Toronto International Film Festival  September 4/05
by Noah Cowan |
 Brokeback Mountain is based on Annie Proulx's much-lauded short story, originally published in "The New Yorker" in 1997 and adapted by acclaimed novelists Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. This literary pedigree gives the film a rare precision and economy of gesture that make its devastating emotional moments rich and resonant. In 1963, two young, poor-as-dirt cowboys, Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger), are hired to tend cattle on top of Brokeback Mountain, Wyoming's most picturesque grazing slope. Suspicious of one another at first, they become fast friends. Increasingly rebellious in their isolated universe, their friendship takes on a dangerous, revolutionary tone. Soon comes a frank and powerful sexual encounter that blossoms into a dreamlike, heart-pounding romance. But the summer ends and their inevitable parting leaves them pained and yearning. Ennis marries his long-time sweetheart and settles down to a life of poverty and screaming kids in Wyoming, while Jack joins the rodeo and eventually makes his fortune with the burgeoning Sun Belt business of his Texan father-in-law. When Jack finally contacts Ennis, sending a postcard to say that he is coming through Wyoming for business, they embark on a painful lifelong relationship fraught with forbidden desire. Brokeback Mountain can be read many ways: as a chronicle of shifting attitudes towards sexuality, as the representative moment when the Old West became the New West or even as a complex marriage between Douglas Sirk and Red River. But it is ultimately and fundamentally a film about love of the most evocative kind - impossible, lustful, all-consuming, passionate love, born in a place of overwhelming beauty at a time of great innocence and hope. I challenge anyone to remain unmoved as society's mores and the inexorable vagaries of the world slowly undermine this love. |