Final Frontier

Howdy pardner: Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. Photo Kimberly French. Courtesy Odeon Films.

We all replay certain, significant scenes from our past: the first or last meeting with a friend; a turning point in a relationship with a parent. In the process of remembering, these scenes slow down in our minds, as though time itself has been stretched. While other memories may shrink to nothing, these ones sprawl out.

The opening scene of Brokeback Mountain plays out with the same slow pacing of an oft-analyzed memory. Two young cowboys, Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), size each other up in the spring sunshine, while applying for summer jobs herding sheep. Jack curses his unreliable pick-up truck; Ennis chews grass and tips his Stetson to shade his eyes. The two don’t exchange a single word. It seems a nothing moment occurring in the middle of nowhere (next to a trailer in Signal, Wyoming, in 1963), but it marks the beginning of a lifelong love affair.

The scene’s stately delivery by director Ang Lee bodes well for what follows. The film, which is based on a short story by Annie Proulx, often manages to make such ordinary moments almost mythic. Although the movie covers the bulk of two lives, Lee is a man with a slow hand who never rushes unnecessarily.

Up on the mountain, the shepherds swap miserable-upbringing stories around the fire. One is a dispossessed orphan, the other has a nasty old cuss for a father. Against a backdrop of majestic cliffs and coursing rivers, they laconically share the plain, sad facts of their childhoods: “he never came to see me ride at a rodeo;” “they repossessed the farm a year after my folks died.”

With Brokeback Mountain, the versatile Lee — whose work has ranged from the arty Asian fight film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to the Jane Austen adaptation Sense and Sensibility, from the comic book spectacle of The Incredible Hulk (his least inspired movie) to the suburban gothic The Ice Storm (his most) — masters the vernacular of yet another genre. As in classic Westerns, Lee paints a stark contrast between the barren emotional landscapes inhabited by his characters and the grand natural ones.

For one summer, Ennis and Jack are afforded a respite from their hardscrabble lives, and they roughhouse and joke their way into each other’s arms. They know from the start they will never enjoy an open relationship. In its impossibility, the film plays the same love-can’t-quite-conquer-all notes that made Casablanca (and, more recently, Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven) sing.

This marriage is a sham: Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Alma Beers (Michelle Williams) tie the knot. Photo Kimberly French. Courtesy Odeon Films.

Once they come down to earth, they both get married; Ennis to his high-school sweetheart (Michelle Williams), Jack to a rodeo queen (Anne Hathaway). Neither the short story nor the film treat these women as one-note victims and the actresses each give stand-out performances. The rodeo mistress grows brassy and callous (and assumes a peroxided ‘do to match), while the gentle sweetheart acquires a spine.

But it is the men’s movie and Ledger and Gyllenhaal throw themselves into their roles (and at each other) with abandon. It’s a little jarring that neither of the characters seems the slightest bit nelly; it’s as if this is a vision of gay life brought to you by the Log Cabin Republicans (the U.S. group of gay conservatives). It’s equally implausible that despite having been taught to hate queers — as a lesson, Ennis’s dad once showed him the corpse of a gay man who had been beaten to death — that both boys’ innards didn’t somehow get completely twisted. They are still innocent enough to sustain a loving, long-term affair and be, in their own ways, true to each other. Again, an “As if!” bell goes off. But the prettiness of the fantasy eventually wins out over such quibbles.

Lee details the middle and end of the affair with the same slow precision as its beginning, and the whole has a fairy-tale quality. If it was never really like this, it ought to have been, because the sweet that Proulx and Lee share with their protagonists far outweighs the bitter.

It’s only in retrospect that we learn the full meaning of such moments as that first meeting. That’s why we replay them. Brokeback Mountain’s first scene could have been portrayed as the moment when everything started to go wrong. Instead, it marks the beginning of a rise into the high country. Once visited, those heights can’t easily be forgotten. The memory is not diminished by all the ensuing drabness, and no number of replays can take its power away.

Alec Scott is a Toronto writer.