What I thought of Brokeback Mountain

** As always, spoilers abound. You’ve been warned. **

To be fair, I really liked Brokeback Mountain. It’s just beautifully directed – which you would expect, because it’s Ang Lee. But no matter how many times they were all nominated, I certainly wasn’t prepared for how good all four lead actors would be. Really, who could have imagined that the guy from A Knight’s Tale and the guy from Donnie Darko would be so good as gay cowboys? Even more, who would have thought a girl from Dawson’s Creek and the girl from the Princess Diaries would be so good as the long-suffering wives of gay cowboys?

But it’s not a perfect movie. It’s slow in places, sometimes with great effect but other times it seems needless. The score is OK at first – spare and quiet, but so repetitive that it soon became noticeable to me (rarely a good sign).

The story itself is a bit of a melodrama, though I suppose that’s typical of love stories. But, curiously, whereas the melodrama of the short story worked, it didn’t work for me in the movie.

The story is fatalistic: From the very first moment Enis tells Jack that he worries about being found out you know at least one of them will die. As in the movie, the literary Jack Twist has ideas and dreams of how they could be together, but (perhaps because the story is told from Enis’ point of view) these never seem logical. As the reader you know the story isn’t going to work out that way.

But, even though I knew how the movie would end, I still found myself rejecting its fatalism. We see Jack in Texas, we know he is aware of the wider world in a way that Enis is not. At one point I started to wonder: Why doesn’t Jack just move to San Francisco? Of course, art – tragedy especially – is all about the choices people could have made but didn’t. Maybe that hint that it could have turned out differently makes the movie better. But not for me.

I try very hard to not let the experience of a movie be too biased by having read the source material beforehand, but Brokeback Mountain was a very different experience indeed. It’s probably the only movie I’ve ever seen with more plot than was in the original story. Given how short the story was based on, this was inevitable. The screenwriters did a good job with both the adaptation and the addition – but because movies are a visual medium and visual obscenity is more shocking than written obscenity and because this obscenity is homosexual and so even more risqué than plain old hetero sex – I felt the movie lacked shock value.

A lot of that is just me, of course. I’m not really shocked by the notion of gayness. Two men kissing isn’t something that turns my head any more than a man and a woman. And while I probably have a more open attitude about that then most of the movie’s audience, I’m still not really sure there was anything in the movie that was shocking to those who went to see it. Everyone walks in knowing they’re going to see “the gay cowboy movie.” Surely no one expects their relationship is only revealed through meaningful glances.

When I originally read it, the story was shocking to me. Here I had read all the way through this wonderful collection of short stories and I came to the last one in which these two cowboys are herding sheep on a mountain one summer. Nothing that came before suggests what the story is going to be about. You figure: sheep are going or a big storm is going to hit. Something. But frankly I would have been less surprised if one of them fucked a sheep than I was when – very suddenly, the whole thing goes from almost wholly platonic to full-on butt-fucking in a just a couple short paragraphs – they started having sex with each other. The story exploits pre-conceptions to shocking effect. I’ve read a lot of stories about men discovering themselves to be gay. I’ve read a lot of stories about cowboys. Reading it later I realized there are hints, little homo-erotic glances and yearning looks – but even that wouldn’t have prepared me for the gusto with which they jump into the sleeping bag.

Much as I remember that, what has always made Brokeback Mountain stick in my mind more than any other Proulx short story is the way it managed to be graphic without actually being graphic. The sex scenes, such as they are, in the story are probably the best I’ve read anywhere in the way they communicate everything important occurring without becoming porn and without being shy. But save for a handful of kisses and their first night as lovers, the sexual component of what Jack and Enis are up to seemed mostly removed from the movie. Which is understandable, I guess, but to me it compromises that good that the film is otherwise doing.

If this were a story of star-crossed heterosexual lovers it would be better than average for a love story, but not award-worthy, not a movie that people talk about even if they haven’t seen it. The whole point of Brokeback Mountain is its gayness. That’s fine to me, most good movies find a hook to turn on: Syriana is about the politics of oil, Munich is about revenge, Capote is about the inner battle of an artist. But it felt like cheating somehow to only tacitly acknowledge why Jack and Enis keep meeting up in the mountains. As Jack says late in the movie, “A few fucks a year” aren’t enough for him; this could almost be surprising because for nearly an hour we haven’t seen the two do much in each other’s company besides hug and drink whiskey and argue.

You have to admire a movie that asks its audience to confront homosexuality as its central issue (most gay movies are about something else – Philadelphia was more about AIDS, RENT is more about, well, AIDS, and Capote was more about being a writer). It’s just a shame that, good as the movie was, it seemed to lack the conviction of its subject.

It's not just that toward the end it stopped being much of a gay movie. It stopped being much of a romance. This is partly why it started to seem pointlessly long at the end. Jack comes and he and Enis fight. Jack comes but Enis has his kids. Jack comes and he and Enis fight. Yawn. Where's the passion? Where's the sex, the kissing, hell any reminder that these men love each other? It just seemed to vanish in the second half of the movie. It would have been a problem in any romance movie; it's especially one for the gay cowboy movie. The finale is powerful and redeems it. But that doesn't forgive the problems that came earlier. Why add so much extra story for Enis but leave Jack's character so murky? Why the waitress character? Why do "films" anymore seem to need to clock in at over (often well over) two hours, when they'd be better in every way if they were shorter?