Love and Longing on Brokeback Mountain

Film: Brokeback Mountain
Cast: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway,
Director: Ang Lee

"What a waste of good testosterone!" was how a female friend retorted when I told her, long ago, that Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were acting as gay cowboys in an Ang Lee film. She was not alone. Disbelief was the most common reaction when Lee brought out his movie. You do not mess around with ‘cowboyhood’. That is the epitome of masculinity, the Mount Everest as far as maleness goes.

After the colossal disaster that was Hulk, Ang Lee needed to redeem himself. He found the perfect vehicle in a short story by Annie Proulx about two young cowboys who have an affair while tending sheep on Brokeback Mountain and how that turned to a deeper love and a longing that affected their lives for the next 20 years. Novelist Larry McMurtry and his writing partner Diana Ossana adapted the story beautifully, Gustavo Santaolalla composed a lilting score and Lee was on his way.

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal have turned in really fine performances as the two lovers. In roles that asked for an extraordinary amount of maturity, the twosome have stood up and asked to be counted. The only minor flaw is that the makeup department couldn’t effectively show Ledger as an older man. He has too boyish a face to convince us he has a grownup daughter. Anne Hathaway says goodbye to her sweet princess image and Michelle Williams is a class apart as a troubled wife. The support cast is one of the best assembled in recent times, in terms of performances, not names.

Brokeback Mountain is a very well-made film. Lee begins slowly, letting us soak in the characters. The lack of pace is compensated by some awesome cinematography. We indulge in some spectacular shots of the two cowboys tending hundreds of sheep on the slopes of a beautiful mountain. The two carry out their seemingly innocuous tasks day after day. But you can feel it that this is an explosion ready to go off at the slightest provocation. And when it happens you marvel at the sensitivity of the director. Even the uneasy sniggers of the idiots behind cannot distract you.

Ang Lee has managed to get the best out of everyone of his cast and crew. Be it Roberta Maxwell who plays Jake’s mother and is on screen for not more than five minutes or be it the art and set departments who never let us feel we were watching a period piece, each one has gelled with the other to create as less flawed a motion picture as it gets in present-day Hollywood.

Brokeback Mountain breaks taboos, treads on paths not travelled before and stands proudly on a lonely mountain. But at its heart it is a very simple story, a love story. Brokeback Mountain may have forever changed the way we look at cowboys, but we are better off for it.