Brokeback Mountain (2005) Review
9/10
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 cannot 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.
It also cost about fourteen million dollars and took around one hundred and eighty worldwide, which 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 is 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, does not finish sentences, and delivers most of his dialogue without opening his mouth properly.
That is the whole performance and it is a genuine 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, which 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.
A character who cannot articulate is harder to write and produces more. Everything has to be conveyed through activity, and the reader does the assembly. The rule is that the writer has to know precisely what is not being said. Vagueness reads as vagueness and precision withheld reads as suppression.
Find one physical object that carries the whole relationship. The shirts are the entire film compressed into an image, and the film earns it by never explaining it.
Build the body first. Ledger’s Ennis is a jaw, a posture and a set of withheld gestures, and the voice follows from the arrangement.
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 is older, and the audience reassembles the interval, which 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, which is 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, which is 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, which is the decision that makes the film serious. Alma and Lureen are not obstacles, they are people who married men who were not available, and the film treats the damage to them as damage.
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 is 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 cannot use, and every domestic scene has that underneath it.
The grocery store sequence is where that lands. She is 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.
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.
A character who knows and says nothing for years is doing more work than one who confronts. The silence has to be visible in the ordinary scenes or the later revelation lands as a device. Show the moment of knowing without dialogue and then let a decade pass.
Give the wronged party an economic reason to stay. Alma cannot leave, which converts her silence from passivity into calculation.
Stage the confrontation during a chore. A kitchen table and dishes removes every opportunity for either party to perform, which is why it lands.
Lee and the Landscape
Rodrigo Prieto shot the Alberta locations as something enormous and indifferent, and the mountain is not 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 is delivered through room size.
Count the ceilings. The mountain has none, and every subsequent 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 is the only element of the film that is 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 is doing a specific job. The two men are inarticulate and the guitar is not, which means the film has one channel that is permitted to say what nobody on screen can.
Crash
This film won Director, Adapted Screenplay and Score. It lost Best Picture to Crash, which is 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 substantial 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 had not screened it, which means the outcome was partly decided by people who declined to see the film.
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 has not 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 and this page’s other entries.
Ledger, Gyllenhaal, Williams and Hathaway were all nominated and none won, which is its own statement. A film with four nominated performances and none rewarded is a film the membership admired and did not want to endorse.
A work about suppression will be received by some readers as a work they do not need to engage with. That is a real cost and it is not a reason to write something else. The record eventually corrects. It corrects slowly and it does not compensate anybody.
Note what the winner did right. Crash was campaigned properly, had a local advantage and was easier to watch, and none of those are accidents.
A film that requires the audience to sit with unresolved damage is always at a disadvantage against one that resolves its own subject. That is a structural fact about how work is received, not a fault in either.
Should you watch Brokeback Mountain?
Yes, and it is better than its reputation as a cultural event. Two men who cannot say anything, twenty years conducted in the gaps between fishing trips, two marriages the film treats as real damage, and two shirts on a hanger that nobody explains.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists