Brokeback Mountain

Here now, a review for a movie that everyone else saw many months ago.

By all rights, I should have liked Brokeback Mountain. I mean, a movie about gay cowboys eating pudding (actually, gay shepherds eating beans, but why split hairs?)… what’s not to like? But for all of the hype surrounding this movie, it was terribly underwhelming.

I suppose I should give the filmmakers a bit of credit for at least making realistic gay characters. For quite some time, most gay characters in movies have been stereotypical charicatures either playing the role of villain, plucky comedy relief (aren’t gays hilarious?), or one-dimensional space-filler. However flawed, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist are multidimensional characters.

But the characters themselves are part of the reason I didn’t like this movie. Ennis, played by Heath Ledger, deserves no admiration or respect. We’re supposed to feel sorry for his character because of the hardships he faced as a teenager. But he emerges from the situation broken and bitter, and he carries that misery into his new family. He’s neglectful and a drunk. And when Ennis and his wife get divorced, he stays in his daughters’ lives. But even outside of his marriage he’s a terrible father and disappoints his children frequently. I got the feeling that his family would have been better off with him out of the picture; being there but being hurtful is worse than not being there at all.

A lot of the critics out there justified Ennis’ actions by saying he was caught up in an intolerant society and that it wasn’t his fault. But let’s say the love of his life was a black woman instead of another man. It would be just as salacious in those times as a gay relationship. Would his behavior be excusable then? I think those who would defend Ennis are promoting a double standard because the movie is about two gay men. But just because the movie is “groundbreaking” doesn’t mean the characters get a pass on anything they might be doing wrong.

For all he does in the movie, Jack—Jake Gyllenhaal—might as well not have a life outside of his relationship with Ennis. His marriage is a total sham. Unlike Ennis, whose homosexual feelings extend only to Jack, Jack is a gay man living a double life and his publicly-facing life is pretty uneventful. We see some friction between him and his in-laws but it doesn’t make him any more interesting of a character.

Because Ennis is unlikable and Jack is uninteresting, it’s hard to feel anything when something happens to them. I felt no emotion during the climax of the movie. What happens isn’t shocking, though it does come out of nowhere—partly because we don’t see what happened, we’re told about it. This violates the cardinal rule of storytelling: show, don’t tell. If you don’t experience what’s happening as it happens, you might as well be reading a newspaper. And, unfortunately for this movie, director Ang Lee violates this ever-important rule many times.

The movie suffers from a lack of flow resulting from telling instead of showing. There are a number of scenes in the movie that don’t add anything to the story. The movie seemed less a cohesive whole than a series of vignettes intended to depress the viewer. There are a lot of beautiful landscape shots of the Wyoming Rockies. It shows all of the drudgery of shepherding for the first 45 minutes with a little bit of plot thrown in here and there. The movie was based on a short story, and I have a feeling it would have been better served as a shorter movie—perhaps 90 minutes—rather than the tedious 134-minute film it turned out to be.

Another thing that bothered me about the movie was that at times I couldn’t understand what the characters were saying. Heath Ledger mumbled through many of his lines, which, combined with his deep voice and adopted Southern accent, made it very difficult to pick out everything he said. I was tempted at times to turn on the subtitles just so I could understand what he was saying. Maybe I’m being a little unfair to Ledger here. His thick accent and deep drawl were spot-on. And I know that there are people that don’t enunciate well (I’ve been known to mumble), but it doesn’t make for very good cinema when you have to adjust your volume and rewind the movie just to hear the dialog.

There wasn’t much for me to like about Brokeback Mountain. One thing I did like was the music. An acoustic guitar gave it a very Western sound, but it added an orchestra without feeling forced or awkward. The love theme, a melancholy but catchy guitar melody, provided more emotion to the screen than any of the characters. It may not have deserved the Oscar, but it did deserve its nomination.

Plus there was the bonus of Willie Nelson singing about gay cowboys during the end credits. That’s not something you hear every day.