Brokeback Mountain (2005) Review

Official trailer

Two young men take a summer job watching sheep above the tree line. One sleeps at the camp and one sleeps with the flock. It gets cold. Twenty years later one of them is still driving to the same fishing trip. The 9 is for a film of extraordinary restraint about two people who can’t say anything, adapted from a short story of about thirty pages, with two performances that are doing almost all of their work below the dialogue.

Brokeback wrecks me, and it does it without fuss. Nobody gives a speech, nobody cries on cue, and it leaves me feeling like I’ve lost something anyway. I think Ledger’s Ennis is as good as screen acting gets, and the film around him is built with a patience I wish more directors had.

It also cost about fourteen million dollars and took around one hundred and eighty worldwide. That made it the most commercially successful film of its kind by a considerable distance and is part of why the Best Picture loss was so widely noticed.

What holds it off a 10 is a slightly conventional final movement and some ageing makeup in the last act that the film would have been better off implying.

The makeup is a small thing and it’s the one place the film asks the audience to accept something instead of believing it, which in a picture this careful is more noticeable than it would be anywhere else.

It Is About Not Saying Things

Ennis del Mar speaks in fragments, doesn’t finish sentences, and delivers most of his dialogue without opening his mouth properly.

That’s the whole performance and it’s a real technical achievement. Heath Ledger constructed a man whose entire physical arrangement is designed to prevent anything getting out, and the audience understands everything anyway.

The film’s method follows from it. Nothing is discussed, nothing is named, and the two men never once have a conversation about what they are. That means every scene has to convey a relationship through practical activity.

The best example is the shirts. Two garments on a hanger, one inside the other, found in a closet in the last ten minutes, and the film has spent two hours making that discovery unbearable without a line of dialogue about what it means.

The shirts undo me. I can’t think of a single image from that decade that hits harder, and it works because the film trusted me to understand it without help.

The Structure Is Twenty Years of Absence

The mountain occupies about forty minutes and the remaining hour and a half is the rest of their lives, in which they see each other perhaps a dozen times.

That proportion is the film’s argument. The thing that mattered happened in one summer and everything afterward is two people conducting other lives in the gaps between fishing trips.

The device is that the film skips years without announcement. A cut, a different haircut, a child who’s older, and the audience reassembles the interval. That reproduces the experience of the characters waiting.

Annie Proulx’s story is about thirty pages and covers the same twenty years in a few thousand words. McMurtry and Ossana expanded it by adding the domestic material. That’s the correct expansion because the original had implied all of it.

Proulx has also said she found the adaptation faithful and the film upsetting to watch. That’s an unusual combination for an author to report and is the strongest available endorsement of what the screenplay did with her material.

Both marriages are given real weight. That’s the decision that makes the film serious. Alma and Lureen aren’t obstacles, they’re people who married men who weren’t available, and the film treats the damage to them as damage.

The wives are people here, a smart choice. Most films like this would have turned Alma and Lureen into obstacles to root against, and I’d have lost interest. Here I feel for everybody in those houses, and that makes the film hurt more.

Michelle Williams

Alma knows from early on and says nothing for years, and Williams plays the knowing without ever playing a revelation.

The scene that establishes it’s wordless. She sees them through a window, the film holds on her face, and nothing is said about it in the picture for another decade of story time. What she does with the intervening years is the performance. Alma is polite, is raising children, is economically trapped, and is carrying something she can’t use, and every domestic scene has that underneath it. The grocery store sequence is where that pays off. She’s working a checkout, he comes in, and the conversation is about nothing, and the audience can see a decade of things neither of them said sitting behind every ordinary sentence in it.

Alma’s second marriage is also given real weight in about four minutes. She remarries, is visibly better off, and the film declines to present the new husband as a compromise, which most versions of this story would have done. The confrontation, when it finally arrives, is at a kitchen table over dishes and lasts about ninety seconds. Williams was nominated and should have won, and the loss is the third defensible complaint about that year’s ceremony.

Williams is the performance I’d point people to right after Ledger’s. The kitchen confrontation is ninety seconds of a woman finally setting down something she’s carried for years, and I think the Academy got that one as wrong as it got Best Picture. Anne Hathaway has the other marriage and the harder tonal problem. Lureen is brittle, businesslike and increasingly artificial across twenty years, and her final telephone call is delivered flatly and is the most devastating scene in the film. Her hair is also the film’s most efficient marker of time. It rises and lightens across twenty years in stages, and the audience can date any Texas scene within a few years from a single shot of the back of her head.

Lee and the Landscape

Rodrigo Prieto shot the Alberta locations as something enormous and indifferent, and the mountain isn’t romanticized at any point.

The film is careful about that. The summer is cold, wet, difficult and largely tedious work, sheep die, the food is bad, and the relationship forms inside a job instead of inside a landscape. What the scale does is establish privacy. These two men are alone for the only time in their lives, and the film’s later interiors are all small, low-ceilinged and full of other people. That contrast is the entire emotional architecture and it’s delivered through room size.

Count the ceilings. The mountain has none, and every later interior in the film is a trailer, a motel, a kitchen or a living room with the frame closing in above the actors. The one exception is a motel room with a high ceiling, used once, near the middle, and the film puts them in it for the only extended stretch of privacy they get after the mountain and then never returns to that space.

Gustavo Santaolalla’s score is a guitar figure, repeated, with very few notes, and it’s the only element of the film that’s permitted to be openly emotional. The absence of score is doing as much as its presence. Large parts of the mountain sequences run on wind, sheep and silence, and the guitar arrives only where the film has decided the audience needs permission to feel something. The score won and deserved to, and it has a clear job. The two men are inarticulate and the guitar isn’t. That means the film has one channel that’s permitted to say what nobody on screen can. That guitar moves me whenever it comes in, and it moves me because the film rations it so carefully. I’d have been furious if some composer had smothered the mountain in strings.

Crash

This film won Director, Adapted Screenplay and Score. It lost Best Picture to Crash. It’s the result the modern Academy is most often asked about.

The mechanics are reasonably well understood. Crash was a Los Angeles film about Los Angeles with a large local cast, was screened aggressively to the membership on DVD, and arrived in a year when a real portion of the voting body was reportedly unwilling to watch this one.

That last part is the fact the record keeps. Several voters said publicly at the time that they hadn’t screened it. That means people who declined to see the film partly decided the outcome. Tony Curtis was the most widely quoted of them and the wording is on the record. A voting body in which not screening a nominee is an acceptable position has a structural problem instead of a taste problem. The comparison hasn’t aged kindly for the winner. Crash is a film in which every character holds one racial attitude that the plot then corrects, and this is a film about two people who lose twenty years, and the gap between them is now the standard example alongside Driving Miss Daisy.

Ledger, Gyllenhaal and Williams were all nominated and none won. That’s its own statement. A film with three nominated performances and none rewarded is a film the membership admired and didn’t want to endorse.

The Crash loss is still indefensible. I don’t mind a film losing to a better one. I mind it losing to a lecture, in a race decided partly by voters who couldn’t be bothered to watch it.

Should you watch Brokeback Mountain?

Yes, and it’s better than its reputation as a cultural event. It’s a 9 because the whole picture is built with a care I rarely see. What keeps me from a 10 is a slightly conventional final stretch and that ageing makeup in the last act, which pulled me out for a moment in a film that never otherwise asks me to pretend. Watch it for Ledger’s jaw, Williams at the kitchen table, Hathaway on the phone and two shirts on a hanger that nobody explains.

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