A Guide to Brokeback Mountain the movie staring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal

Brokeback Mountain is that rare thing, a big Hollywood weeper with a beautiful ache at its center. It's a modern-age Western that turns into a quietly revolutionary love story. In 1963, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), a couple of dirt-poor ranch hands, take a job guarding a flock of sheep on Brokeback Mountain, a pristine jutting vista nestled in the lush Wyoming wilderness. Ennis, a crusty, taciturn loner with a scowl that might have been carved into his pale face, and Jack, an amateur rodeo rider who has held on to his optimistic boyishness, are youthful anachronisms, relics of the fading days of the Great Plains culture. But they're still cowboys to the core; they've fallen into this life because it feeds something in them.

To keep the coyotes away, Jack is assigned to sleep near the flock, but mostly the two men have hours, days, and weeks on their hands. They jump on horses to guide the sheep across meadows and rivers; they sit around a campfire, heating canned beans and swapping stories and a bottle of whiskey. Then, one night, when it's too cold for either one of them to sleep outside, they do something that the old movie cowboys never did: They wrap their bodies in a rough embrace and, without a hint of seduction, they have sex, an act that's as shocking to them as it is to us.

Because it feels right, they do it again as the days go by. Yet what is it, exactly, they're feeling, this urgent seizure of loneliness and affection and desire? Ennis and Jack, who've been raised in a world where to be ''queer'' is not to be a man (and is therefore unthinkable), can't grasp the feeling that's come over them because they literally don't have the words for it. In their very innocence, they are, in an odd way, a bit like the ancient Greeks, who saw homosexuality as an exalted expression of male friendship. Ennis and Jack call each other ''friend,'' and they mean it, but their bond evolves into a delicate, suspended romance, and Brokeback Mountain becomes their Eden, the craggy cowboy paradise from which they are destined to fall.

Adapted from Annie Proulx's brilliant 1997 short story, Brokeback Mountain was directed by Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) from a script by the venerable Western novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, and together they have coaxed Proulx's anecdotal, through-the-years narrative into a wistful epic of longing and loss. Lee stages the picture with an enraptured tranquillity that lets each emotion shine through. At times, it's a bit too tranquil, especially in the episodic second half, but when Brokeback Mountain takes off, it soars.

Ennis and Jack drift into their separate lives, each caught in a fractured marriage with children, but they reunite over the years, going on fishing trips where no fishing gets done, sharing, however fleetingly, the connection they can barely speak of. They're products victims of a closeted culture, yet secrecy and repression work on them in a special way. They're men who have fallen in love without quite realizing that's what's happened to them, and the glory of Brokeback Mountain is that in tracing their fates, treating their passion as something unprecedented a force so powerful it can scarcely be named the movie makes love seem as ineffable as it really is.

Jack, a shade more comfortable with his nature, talks of getting a ranch together, but Ennis will have none of it: Stung by childhood memories of a rancher who lived with a man and got bashed for it, he fears he knows that exposure could kill them. In the classic Westerns, the cowboys were often men of few words, but Heath Ledger speaks in tones so low and gruff and raspy his words just about scrape ground, and he doesn't string a whole lot of those words together. Ennis' inexpressiveness is truly ..inexpressive, yet ironically eloquent for that very reason, as tiny glimmers of soul escape his rigid facade. Ennis says nothing he doesn't mean; he's incapable of guile, yet he erupts in tantrums the anger of a man who can't be what he is and doesn't realize the quandary is eating him alive. Ledger, with beady eyes and pursed lips, gives a performance of extraordinary, gnarled tenderness. Gyllenhaal is touching in a different way, his puppy eyes widening with hope, then turning inward and forlorn.

As the movie goes on, Ennis, penniless and alone, becomes a shard of a man, nurturing a lost dream. Brokeback Mountain has a luscious doomed tenor that, at times, makes it feel like Edith Wharton with Stetsons. It's far from being a message movie, yet if you tear up in the magnificent final scene, with its haunting slow waltz of comfort and regret, it's worth noting what, exactly, you're reacting to: a love that has been made to knuckle under to society's design. In an age when the fight over gay marriage still rages, Brokeback Mountain, the tale of two men who are scarcely even allowed to imagine being together, asks, through the very purity with which it touches us: When it comes to love, what sort of world do we really want?

Some quotes about the movie from Mtv.com below

"I had a journalist stand up in the middle of a press conference the other day," offered star Jake Gyllenhaal, conceding the point. "[He said,] 'You know, I want to apologize, because for weeks I've been calling this movie "the gay cowboy movie" in all of my columns. I saw it last night and I'll never call it that again.' People will joke ... but ultimately, when they walk out of it, a lot of people are kind of blown away by what it's really about."


"[I'm] just proud; really, really just proud," Ledger's co-star and real-life fiancee, Michelle Williams, beamed proudly. "The man that's on that screen is nothing like the man that I know. It really takes my breath away, and I know him pretty well."

Director Ang Lee, for one, said that the preconceived notions of two heterosexual leads playing lovers resulted in a tremendous buildup that couldn't help but get to them. "Psychologically, it does," the "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" helmer admitted. "We cleared the set — it was a kissing scene by a staircase. And then we rolled the camera and it was a raw kind of take: handheld and very passionate. And once the camera rolls, you just focus on doing well and seven, eight takes [later] it was done."

"I'm hopeful, confident and realistic," said Anne Hathaway who, like Williams, sheds her teenage image while portraying one of the cowboys' long-suffering wives. "What I expect to happen is it'll play very well in a lot of blue states and do OK in some red states."


"I just hope that they watch it and that they don't just blindly judge it and say, 'Oh no, that's the gay cowboy story,' " Hathaway said. "Every single person that has called it 'the gay cowboy story' in front of me, after seeing the film, comes to me and says, 'I apologize. It is one of the most beautiful love stories I have ever seen, and I'm sorry if I ever said anything that was dismissive of it.' "

"The universal story of it all affects so many different people," Gyllenhaal insisted, summing things up. "It doesn't really matter. To me, what's important is that it's a beautiful story."

Golden Globe Nominations:
best dramatic picture
best director (Ang Lee)
best actor in a drama (Heath Ledger)
best supporting actress in a drama (Michelle Williams)
best screenplay
best original score
best original song

Credited cast:
Jake Gyllenhaal        Jack Twist
Heath Ledger        Ennis Del Mar
Michelle Williams        Alma Beers Del Mar
Anne Hathaway    Lureen Newsome Twist
Randy Quaid    Joe Aguirre
Linda Cardellini    Cassie Cartwright
Anna Faris    LaShawn Malone
Scott Michael Campbell     Monroe
Kate Mara    ....     Alma Del Mar Jr.
Cheyenne Hill         Alma Del Mar Jr. (age 13)
Brooklynn Proulx         Jenny Del Mar (age 4)
Tom Carey       Jimbo the Rodeo Clown

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