Harvard Square Cinema, Cambridge, MA

**** / ****

by Scott Muoio

“If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.”

Brokeback Mountain is one of the greatest movies I have ever seen. It is not, however, about gay cowboys, as those who have heard about it probably joked, and not really about homosexuality either. Rather, Brokeback Mountain is about feelings that get us when we least expect them and then linger in our minds and in our hearts forever. It is not about love, necessarily, but about knowing that the greatest experiences in our lives are usually those that we can’t enjoy forever. Sure, in this case it tells the story of two cowboys who experience what we can only call love over a period of twenty years, but it could have interchangeably been many other things. As Roger Ebert observed, “I can imagine someone weeping at this film, identifying with it, because he always wanted to stay in the Marines, or be an artist or a cabinetmaker.” No truer words were ever written.

Although homosexuality is front and center in this film, it is forbidden love in general that makes the movie so moving. Because our culture and time plays such a large part in who we are and what we become it is often impossible to sustain those eras in our life that we carry the most fondness for. In Brokeback Mountain, that era is the summer Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhall) spend together tending sheep in the Wyoming mountains. They tell each other, after their first sexual encounter, that they are not gay, yet go on to establish a sexual relationship that spans twenty years. In a way, the statements are no different than a ex-baseball player saying he isn’t a ball player anymore because he’s too old to swing a bat or a cellist saying she isn’t a musician anymore because her arthritis makes playing unbearable, but they are, even if their situations no longer allow the manifestation of their hearts’ feelings. Whether or not Ennis and Jack are gay is not the big question in Brokeback Mountain. To assume that, I think, is to miss the bigger point of the movie. Rather, the question becomes, in what way can Jack and Ennis go on living as their minds, bodies, and emotions evolve over a lifetime?

The magic in Brokeback Mountain is not merely in the relationship we see on screen. Director Ang Lee has created something that transcends a simple love story by avoiding labels, clichés, typical plot points and the highs and lows found in other romantic movies. The film doesn't wave a banner or plot to uplift a cause. Rather, the beauty in Lee's film is his ability to use the love story as a springboard to something much different and much more personal. Lee gives us characters trapped not only by their desires and culture, but their own inability to move on. He expertly poses many questions that most films simply ignore: Why must these two married men, who spent barely a summer together, continue meeting after their lives have changed and can no longer accommodate their friendship? Why must the two keep fighting against age, place, and time in order to relive the past? Do they fear who they have become? Or perhaps, more intriguingly, are they still haunted by the most wonderful moments from their past and their inability to ever feel that way again?

I believe we can find in Heath Ledger's restrained performance the answer to those questions as well see the pinnacle of Lee's genius. Ledger's Ennis is a man constantly holding back, forever suppressing feeling, thought, and emotion. He is a product of his time and place yet also constantly in struggle against it. Home is something Ennis can never know because he has never felt comfortable in who he is and where he lives. Even in his own skin, Ennis is constantly squirming, he never peers in a mirror, and his eyes are always darting away no matter where they should be focused.

It was only amongst the trees and rivers of Brokeback Mountain with his friend Jack that Ennis ever truly felt and acted at home. Not with his wife or children, not in the town or in the country, not working or resting, not alone or at a bar was anything else even close. It is that portrayal of homelessness by Lee and Ledger that makes Brokeback Mountain, for me, one of the greatest and saddest movies I have ever seen. We've all had our own Brokeback Mountain, and that's why Brokeback Mountain is a beautiful film.

Dorothy had Kansas. And Ennis will always have Brokeback, even if it can only be in his memories and his dreams.

Rest In Peace, Heath Ledger 1979-2008.