Lonesome cowboy blues
Brokeback Mountain, dir. Ang Lee.
One of the first things that struck me while watching Ang Lee’s latest film was a sense of being hemmed in, or trapped both visually and emotionally, that seemed far removed from the wide-open vistas one usually associates with a western. That is, until I realised that, for all its cowboys and mountain ranges and rodeos, the film is visually, thematically and narratively a full-blown melodrama, not a western. At its core, cinematic melodrama turns on the tension between desire and convention, between what we want, and what society says we should, or must, do. One of its hallmarks is often a sense of overwhelming claustrophobia, a reflection of the sense of being hemmed in, trapped, entombed in a life that has no space for paths other than the ones society decrees acceptable. Whether the issue at stake is class, race, or (in this case) sexuality, the tears melodrama evokes are tears of bitterness and grief at the ways in which the dead hand of ‘normality’ misshapes and distorts the life of the heart.
These are precisely the tears Lee is asking from you (and most probably will get) in return for his story of two cowboys (Ennis Del Mar, played by Heath Ledger, and Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal—both excellent performances, in quite different ways) who fall deeply, physically, and inescapably in love while working together as young men on Brokeback Mountain, and then must struggle through marriages, children, and all the myriad requirements of a social normality, all the while desperately trying, and failing, to find a space for a relationship that has no place within any of that. One of the things that gives the film its richness, however, is that it does not set up a simplistic ‘society bad, freedom good’ dichotomy. As well as the prejudice, contempt and brutality that Ennis and Jack hide from, we also see the pain that the contradictions in their lives causes in the lives of those around them. This is especially true of Ennis’s wife, played beautifully by Michelle Williams, and Jack’s mother (Roberta Maxwell) who appears only at the very end of the film but offers a deeply moving portrayal of the torment caused by the combination of her love for Jack and the impossibility of saying out loud the truth she knows of who and what he is.
Ultimately, it is