BREAKTHROUGH MOUNTAIN

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is the most important gay film in decades, argues Richard Watts

Despite being a life member of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, and a paid-up member of the Australian Film Critics Association, I can’t remember the last time – indeed any time – that a love story about a 20-year relationship between two men has generated as much buzz as Ang Lee’s forthcoming Brokeback Mountain. That’s because it’s never happened before.

The hype around this so-called ‘gay cowboy movie’ was immediate once its stars were announced: Australian actor Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko). With the Oscars now only a few months away, the buzz is becoming deafening.

Already the film has won the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and been awarded Best Picture, Actor and Director by the New York Film Critics Circle. It is widely tipped for similar success in the upcoming Golden Globes, perceived by many in the film industry as an indicator of which way the votes will fall come the Academy Awards.

Based on the short story by Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain tells the story of two young men, the taciturn ranch-hand Ennis del Mar (Ledger) and the extroverted rodeo rider Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal), who meet while herding sheep in the mountains of Wyoming in the early 1960’s; long before the Stonewall Riots had helped usher in the comfortable gay lifestyle that so many of us take for granted today. Despite a winter spent making rough and passionate love, the two men part, marry, and are forced to live out their grand passion in discrete moments across the following two decades.

Like many of Ang Lee’s films, which have included The Wedding Banquet and Sense and Sensibility, the movie is driven by its central character’s star-crossed relationship. As the director put it, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last month, "Repression is a main element of my movies. It's easier to work against something than along with something."

By focusing on the tortuous emotional relationship between his two main characters, Lee encourages audiences to view the film as a classic love story in the vein of Romeo and Juliet rather than as a strictly gay film. While this tactic could anger some elements of the queer community, who might argue that Lee is denying the story’s gay elements, it ensures that Brokeback Mountain will be widely viewed outside the gay ghetto, thus guaranteeing its financial success, and perhaps in turn ensuring that Hollywood green-lights future gay-themed projects.

Compared to the insipid Philadelphia (1993), which was too scared to show its lovers actually loving one another; and more recently Oliver Stone’s awkward Alexander, which neutered the relationship between the all-conquering Alexander the Great (Colin Farrell) and his lover Hephaistion (the sultry Jared Leto), Lee has ensured that his film is unequivocally about two men who are physically and emotionally in love. Although not especially explicit, its sex scenes will undoubtedly please gay audiences hungry to see the realities of their lives echoed in a major motion picture.

Conversely, independent films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Swoon (1992) and Sugar (2004) have been bolder in their portrayal of gay love, but have lacked the mainstream appeal of Ang Lee’s latest and most moving film.

By pairing a hot young cast with an internationally renowned director, Brokeback Mountain has the potential to touch – and perhaps even change – a mainstream audience’s hearts and minds. It is also a flawlessly executed testimony to the price anyone, gay or straight, can pay for not being true to his or her own nature.

Brokeback Mountain opens nationally on Thursday January 26.

This article originally appeared in MCV #259 Friday 16 December.