Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain: Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger (top); Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway (bottom)
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN Review: Part I
Jack's frustration with Ennis leads to excessive drinking and to the search for companionship elsewhere. "You have no idea how bad it gets!" he yells at Ennis in the film's climactic confrontation scene. "… I wish I knew how to quit you." Such all-consuming yearning is meant to be the result of a communion of souls, but that communion is nowhere to be found in the interplay between the two characters. Part of the problem lies with Ang Lee's direction.
First I must say that Lee, who has dealt with similar themes before in The Wedding Banquet and The Ice Storm, does a generally good job in terms of skirting melodramatic pitfalls and, with the assistance of Rodrigo Prieto's miraculous lenses, in capturing the magic of Brokeback Mountain and the vastness of the American West. The film's first shot, later repeated under radically different circumstances, is one of the most striking ever put on screen.
Nonetheless, Lee fails to bring out the heat of passion when Ennis and Jack are together, and their inner emptiness when they are not. Their longing for one another is communicated through the dialogue, a handful of moments (e.g., Ennis' throwing up after their first separation), and a couple of bear hugs and kisses, but it's noticeably absent from the film's atmosphere until its final sequence. To be fair, I'd also say that the two leading men are equally to blame for those shortcomings.
Much of the publicity surrounding Brokeback Mountain focused on presenting Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as hetero off-screen studs playing homo on-screen studs, as if "playing gay" — a couple of rough kissing scenes and a simulated sex act — is per se both a display of thespian courage and an example of great screen acting. Whatever those actors' sexual orientation, perhaps it's true that they were brave to tackle those roles.
That said, in their scenes together Ledger and Gyllenhaal are utterly incapable of conveying, whether through a sparkle in the eye or a quivering in the voice, the passion that Ennis and Jack are supposed to feel for one another. The chemistry between the two stars, an absolute must in such a film, is painfully lacking in Brokeback Mountain. (For real chemistry between two guys on-screen, check out Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke in Stephen Frears' 1985 drama My Beautiful Laundrette, or Yehuda Levi and Ohad Knoller in Eytan Fox's 2002 — talk about subversive — anti-military drama Yossi & Jagger.)
There are other problems with Ledger's and Gyllenhaal's performances as well, though of the two Ledger comes off best. Despite a few lapses, most notably during Ennis' emotional confrontation with Jack near the film's finale, the Australian Ledger creates a convincing Wyoming cowpoke, and his dramatic range is at times quite impressive. Ledger's final moment in Brokeback Mountain, for instance, is nothing short of masterful. On the down side, he never makes his archetypal silent cowboy either mysterious or alluring enough to justify Jack's perennial longing for him.
Gyllenhaal, for his part, succeeds only in showing the earnest efforts of a mellow big-city actor trying to pass for a rough cowboy. I should add that in Proulx's short story, those men are not only truly rough, they're also unattractive. Ennis and Jack were considerably softened and prettified for the screen.
Moreover, the role of the emotionally torn Jack Twist is way beyond Gyllenhaal's range. When Jack has a climactic outburst during his last meeting with Ennis at Brokeback, Gyllenhaal gives his all but, tripping on his erratic Texanized accent, he fails to fully express Jack's final eruption of anger, sadness, and despair. Also, though in their mid-20s, neither actor is at all believable as a teenager in the beginning of the film or as a man in his late 30s at the film's conclusion. (The poor makeup job, especially on Gyllenhaal's face, doesn't help matters any.)