Brokeback Mountain  © Screen Daily, September 5/05
by Lee Marshall in Venice |
 Take Brokeback Mountain: the director's most complete and accomplished film to date comes across as the late masterpiece of an auteur dedicated to chronicling the demise of the American Dream. A moving, measured, humane love story – and only incidentally a gay one – Brokeback Mountain derives its considerable emotional charge from its eye for details, from its laconic dialogue, from its careful dosing of small but devastating revelations, and from the bravura performances elicited by Lee from his cast – including a revelatory Heath Ledger. Brokeback Mountain, which plays Toronto after it screening in competition at Venice, demands a certain patience and attention from its audience. But star appeal and Oscar murmurings should propel the film to the top of the indie box-office tables both at home and abroad, while upbeat critical word should draw the attention of more mainstream audiences. The film opens in the US on Dec 9 and in the UK on Dec 26. The film is a surefire bet for a roster of Oscar nominations, which in addition to nods in one or both of the Best Film and Best Director slots are likely to include Best Actor for Ledger, Adapted Screenplay for Ossana and McMurtry's sensitive adaptation of Anne Proulx's short story, Art Direction for Judy Becker's painstakingly researched evocation of the sad provincial underbelly of America in the 1960s and 1970s, and Cinematography for Rodrigo Prieto's still-photo take on the American West, which turns even the shabby interiors into impersonal landscapes, indifferent to their human inhabitants. Composer Gustavo Santolalla, another close associate of Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, provides a spare score that caresses the action, sentimentally but mostly effectively, with Cooder-like guitar breaks. Given the assured result, it's difficult to understand why the project spent over seven years in development hell before Focus Features took it on: could it really be because a drama about two cowboys in love is still considered a delicate subject for a major studio? Paradoxically, it is the lack of overt man-on-man action that makes Brokeback Mountain so magnificently subversive: not since Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together has the fact that this love story happens to be between two men been so tangential to a film's emotional interests or impact. Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) meet one summer on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming, hired by local ranch boss Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid) to protect his sheep from wolf and coyote attacks in their remote upland pasture. Jack is the fiery one, the impulsive Texan Rodeo rider who is as surprised by his emotions as Ennis but far more open to their consequences. It's Ennis, though, who is the really memorable character: tough but shy, taciturn, unable to open up or really express his emotions. But it's the details that make the writing so spot-on: the way a playful tussle between the two men, after their sexual bonding, turns to a fist-fight as Ennis attempts to slug it out with a part of himself that he is afraid of; the wound-up excitement in the body and face of Ennis on the day he waits – at home, in the company of a wife (Williams) he loves – for Jack's first visit after a four-year absence. Rhythmically, the film takes its cue from the slow rhythms of life around these parts: the passing of the seasons, harvest and planting, the time to take the herds up the mountain and the time to bring them down. One is reminded, at times, of Terence Malick's Days Of Heaven – another nature-soaked film which takes its time, and forces the audience to do the same. And yet it rarely drags, or seems too long, as there is drama embedded in the apparently inconsequential dialogue, and the way that so much is unsaid, and touches of wry social humour: the increasingly fluffy, dyed hairstyles of Jack's wife Lureen (Hathaway), the dogged way an ineffectual electric carving knife, as advertised on TV, whirrs away as a token of bourgeois normalcy when everything is so far from normal, or comfortable, or even bearable. |