This review was published in the UK music magazine Plan B on the film’s release. This is my edited draft before publication – the final published version (which I no longer have in hard copy) may differ slightly. With thanks to Plan B film editor SF Said.
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Tender Hearts
One Night on Bareback Mountain; Tender Loin; Big Girl’s Blouse; Boys Do Cry. There’s plenty other reviewers out there to deal in snide homophobia. Fuck ‘em. And fuck all those macho reviewers who fainted when Brokeback Mountain stole the crown at Venice. True, there’s no auteurial presence to ooh and aah over (apart from Lee’s trademark slightly off framing shots, intense light and, er, sheep), and your hosts are the teen stars of The Day After Tomorrow (Jake Gyllenhaal), A Knight’s Tale (Heath Ledger), The Princess Diaries (Anne Hathaway) and Dawson’s Creek (Michelle Williams).
But the smooth Hollywood exterior girds a tender, dangerous heart: a love story told in minimal gestures and fewer words that anticipates, in its two horrific queerbashings, the brutal beating it will likely get from the rightwing US press.
Brokeback Mountain is Sense & Sensibility with – well, they’re scarily alike. Both based on fiction by renowned women writers, the films pierce the hearts of tightly-guarded people in highly restrictive societies. In doing so, they share an attention to period detail (paeans could be written to the sideburns stylings of the lead men), dances where social rules are insidiously but brutally imposed, and loving but never lavish landscape cinematography.
And sheep – seriously. Whereas in Sense & Sensibility the flocking sheep represent the social conformity that binds Elinor Dashwood (Emma Thompson), in Brokeback Mountain they offer an image of freedom (moving through pastures where no-one is watching), vulnerability (in one striking image, gutted by a coyote) and a certain rough tenderness: whether grappling with a sheep or each other, Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) speak a language of gestures at once caring and combative, honed through the ethic of hard knocks worked into every texture in the film. Dented coffee cans, beat-up trucks and old jackets are as much a telling, feeling landscape as the rocky distances and lined faces.
Like Elinor Dashwood and the Hulk, Twist and Del Mar are loners who conceal passionate selves beneath false exteriors. Twist is a smooth-talking clown, a natural car salesman, while Del Mar is cut from cowboy cloth. In him, the Man with No Name meets the love that dare not speak its name. Silence and a spare score contribute to the wide open spaces of the film’s beginning, where freed from social constraints when they spend a summer herding together on Brokeback Mountain, they find a love that will sustain – and bedevil – them through twenty claustrophobic years of marriage, poverty and terrible hair, scored perfectly by the seventies country music playing on jukeboxes and radios, eradicating the silence in which they found each other.
The women they cheat on – Alma (Michelle Williams) and Lureen (Hathaway) – hold their own, from the moment Lureen charges across the screen on a rodeo course in a red outfit, a slash of lipstick across the greens and browns of the boy’s own world. Alma uses sex to get what she wants, which is the material security to escape poverty. Williams carries an unsympathetic role with an inspired innocence that lights up her courageous and misguided attempt to help Ennis about Jack. Hathaway is astonishing as daddy’s girl Lureen. Her flickering glances and nervous fingers in Lee’s searching close-ups indicate her awareness of the stupidity of the net that she is caught in – nowhere more so than in her only conversation with Ennis, so intense and intimate you forget that it’s over a telephone.
Yet you never do. Lee has a quiet genius for capturing the character of, and distance between, people’s inner worlds that finds its fullest expression here, and in the scene that follows in which Ennis visits Jack’s childhood home. The worn light and faded objects of Jack’s spare bedroom and Ennis’ attentive silence could break the least tender heart. Here is the core of the film, deep in cowboy country, in the blank house of Jack’s stern parents: set against the mountain is the closet, the claustrophobic, secret heart – the hidden space that Lee opens in each of his characters, as Ennis reaches for the last of Jack, and in doing so finally reaches into himself.
The last fifteen minutes of the film belong to Ennis – and to Ledger, who brings an intense seriousness to each of his actions, whether washing plates or kissing. He’s tender as meat is tender, beaten down until pain and love are indistinguishable. The rack of smoking elk meat that dominates Ennis and Jack’s longest conversation argues that tough hides disguise tender hearts, and that homosexuality is as American as red meat. Willie Nelson singing Bob Dylan’s “He Was Friend of Mine” over the credits brings it home. Lee pulls no punches about the homophobia of the red states – nor any about the love between men, natural as the mountain pasture.