Unforgettable Ride Together Into the Sunset
Movie Review by DES PARTRIDGE
Perth Sunday Times
22jan06

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Brokeback Mountain (MA)
Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal,Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams
Five Stars
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ALL elements of the marvellous medium of film come together for an unforgettable experience in Ang Lee's bittersweet treatment of Annie Proulx's heart-wrenching modern cowboy romance. Proulx had long thought her 28-page novella impossible to put on film, but she has been proved wrong by the exceptional treatment veteran Texas writer Larry McMurtry (The Last Picture Show, Hud, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove) and his regular collaborator Diana Ossana have conceived.

The writers have taken the original story beyond its gay cowboy lament, and added more layers and poignancy to formulate an emotional drama that has been treated with great respect by the sensitive Ang Lee (whose Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won an Oscar for best foreign language film).

Barely touched on in Proulx's original, details of the cowboys' troubled marriages are expanded in McMurtry and Ossana's treatment to ensure the movie is more than a daring male love story (the most gay drama, surely, since Midnight Cowboy 35 years ago). What Hollywood movies usually hint at is treated matter-of-fact and poignantly.

The time is 1963 and two eager-to-work 19-year-old drifters, orphan loner Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger, giving the performance of his young career) and sometime rodeo rider Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), meet at the office of a local rancher, Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid) in a one-horse town in Wyoming.

They are hired as shepherds to spend the freezing winter alone on Brokeback Mountain (with the Canadian Rockies standing in for Wyoming locations). Gradually, over the days and weeks the men spend together, the customary male reserve is broken down as they provide each other with snippets of information about their lives.

On a freezing night, Jack insists that Ennis (his name translates as "island") should share his tent – and their relationship develops beyond sharing a drink together, although when dawn breaks both make it clear this was a one-off encounter.

This proves not to be true, and before they leave the mountain the men have fallen in love.

Ennis is heart-broken by the separation (but conceals his true feelings from Jack).

The time they've spent together on Brokeback Mountain is going to be the happiest of their lives.

While Jack returns to Texas and marries well – his rodeo queen wife Lureen (Anne Hathaway) is the daughter of a well-off farm equipment dealer – Ennis stays in Wyoming, and fathers two daughters with his wife Alma (Michelle Williams).

While the pre-Oscar buzz has been about Ledger's beautifully developed performance, and Gyllenhaal's great acting too, the two young female leads also rise to the occasion.

You can feel Alma's pain when after their long separation Jack arrives from Texas to a smothering embrace from Ennis, and the lovers depart on a fishing trip that is an excuse for them to resume their physical relationship.

Fearful of living together and ending their unhappy marriages – "if you can't fix it, you've got to stand it," Ennis tells Jack – they continue for 20 years to be limited to occasional "fishing trips" before their love affair is brought to a close by forces outside.

Ledger, impressive as he is throughout the movie, takes his acting to another level when called on to show the ageing Ennis's feelings. Proulx's short story gets a whole lot bigger in this classic movie achievement that will hold you in its grip forever.