Way Out West

Brokeback Mountain's romance ain't all that unconventional, really.

By Cheryl Eddy

Brokeback Mountain

AS ANYONE WHO'S seen The Player knows, most Hollywood products can be summarized in five words or less. (You know, "Speed: It's Die Hard on a bus!") Brokeback Mountain's succinct pitch – "the gay cowboy movie" – may be accurate enough, but it's really too simple a tag to hang on Ang Lee's film. Apart from being a western – and from being a gorgeously made film that just might have the power to woo even homophobic red-staters – Brokeback is, in essence, a great old-fashioned romance.

Still, Brokeback, adapted from Annie Proulx's short story by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, gallops into release billed as, yes, the gay cowboy movie. In 1963 Wyoming, two men seek a summer's worth of work tending sheep on an isolated mountain. Their crabby new boss (Randy Quaid) hires them without either ranch hand speaking a word, and the pair – garrulous Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and taciturn Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) – soon settle into a routine revolving around coyotes, campfires, and brief exchanges about the food situation (Jack hates beans). Occasionally, a wayward bear or a lightning storm breaks the monotony. Familiar western motifs abound, including rugged hills, feisty horses, giant belt buckles, and the ability to smoke a cigarette in the saddle, Marlboro Man-style. A steel guitar twangs plaintively on the soundtrack.

Without much warning, after just a few sidelong glances you might notice just because you're waiting for 'em, the friendship becomes something more – something entirely unfamiliar in the world of conventional westerns. The morning after, Jack and Ennis muster this tough-guy exchange: "You know I ain't queer." "Me neither." (Not a conversation John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart ever had, I'd reckon.) When the summer ends, it seems the romance must too. Not only does the Jack-Ennis hook-up break nearly every relationship taboo under Wyoming's big, conservative sky, Ennis is set to marry his hometown sweetie, Alma (Ledger's real-life baby mama, Michelle Williams). So Jack returns to the rodeo circuit, and Ennis becomes more or less domesticated. Years pass.

If this were, say, The Notebook, the two lovers – ripped apart by society and circumstance – would finally reunite, and, by golly, they'd find a way to be together. Though their complications are a tad stickier (like, if they're seen kissing, Jack and Ennis could be killed), Brokeback's central couple fits into this same Hollywood template with relative ease. Though neither is alone in the relationship – besides Alma, there's Jack's wife, barrel racer Lureen (Anne Hathaway), not to mention the irrepressible Jack's implied dalliances with other men – who is soul mates with whom is never in doubt. The terse postcards exchanged to arrange the men's first encounter since their Brokeback summer ("We was fishing buddies," Ennis inexplicably fibs when explaining Jack to Alma) offer so little buildup that when they actually meet again, the rush of emotion packed into the moment is startling, and incredibly stirring. It's Brokeback's turning point. If this were, say, Titanic (don't laugh – more than one media outlet has pointed out the similarity between the films' posters), it'd be the "you jump, I jump" scene.

As The Notebook, and Titanic, and a bajillion other movies and stories (starting with the likes of Romeo and Juliet) have taught us, it's much more thrilling and memorable when the happiness of the fated pair is threatened by towering obstacles, be they disapproving families, a sinking ship, or the fact that their relationship can never, ever go public. Brokeback takes place over some 20 years, and as Jack and Ennis grow older, their lives become more entangled with real-world responsibilities. In their lives, their love, which exists on an idyllic plane far removed from daily drudgery like asshole in-laws and child support, is the one constant. "If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it," Ennis figures, and stand it they do, even as their pain and frustration come to nearly eclipse the scope of their passion.

If Brokeback were about a male-female couple, there's no way it wouldn't instantly appeal to the demographic that inhaled copies of The Bridges of Madison County. It's inevitable that the "gay cowboy" angle will put certain audiences off – hard to understand in San Francisco, but gay romance is a decidedly foreign concept elsewhere (like in real cowboy country, for instance). Those who'd shun this beautiful movie for its gay content couldn't be missing out more. If you must stick a label on it, you might as well call Brokeback the year's greatest love story – and hold out hope that in a few months, you'll be able to call it Best Picture.

'Brokeback Mountain' opens Fri/9 in Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for showtimes.