A Tender Cowpoke Love Story

By Richard Schickel

Talk about revisionist westerns! Brokeback Mountain is, as far as one can tell, the first movie to trace the course of a homosexual relationship between a pair of saddle tramps, doing so in considerable--if discreetly visualized--detail, from first idyllic rapture to angry rupture some 20 years later.

Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) meet in the summer of 1963 when they sign on to tend a herd of sheep on the eponymous peak, which director Ang Lee locates high in ravishing Marlboro Country. Ennis is a slow-drawling man's man, a simple soul content to live out a life of low-paying odd jobs. Jack is more restless--a not very successful rodeo rider when the spirit moves him but also a man for other, upwardly mobile opportunities. He's the one who initiates their first sexual encounter, although in the act itself he plays the passive role while Ennis is the aggressor. On the other hand (and that ambiguity is one of the film's strengths), in the rest of their relationship Ennis plays the elusive, more feminine role, and Jack is his determined pursuer.

That first time is supposed to be a one-off arrangement; neither one wants or expects to fall in love with another man. And indeed, after their summer together, each gets married: Ennis to the sweet Alma (Michelle Williams), with whom he has two children, Jack to Lureen (Anne Hathaway), daughter of a prosperous farm-equipment dealer. Four years pass before Jack returns to Ennis and they begin taking "fishing trips" together--even though Jack is becoming something of a yearning prairie cruiser in the interim.

The movie becomes more and more episodic as the years wear on, losing intensity and conviction in the process and betraying the passionate romanticism of its beginnings. Since it was written (from a story by Annie Proulx) by Larry McMurtry and his partner, Diana Ossana, it focuses, as some of his fiction does, on the modern, anti-romantic West, a place of trailer parks and honky-tonks, of small, thwarted hopes, wrangling wranglers and sweet dreams betrayed by raw reality. That sense of place is true to life, one imagines, but it has a dwindling effect on this well-acted and well-made movie. For all its brave beginnings and real achievements--its assault on western mythology, its discovery of a subversive sexual honesty in an unexpected locale--Brokeback Mountain finally fails to fully engage our emotions.