Brokeback Mountain

“You know it could be like this, just like this always.**” **(20TH ANNIVERSARY SCREENING) ** One of the things that stood out to me the most this time was just how violent and physical and desperate Ennis and Jack’s version of love is. Half the time you can’t tell if they’re about to fight or fuck but whatever it is, it’s something deeply carnal within the both of them. That initial tent scene is so rigid with pent up friction and repressed self control that it borders on agony. Ang Lee has a very specific, hyper focused focus on really examining the pain and the heartbreak that both of these men endure because of the road they’ve had to embark upon out of survival. For all the (correct) chatter over the last two decades about the two men’s performance at the epicenter of the whole thing, I don’t think Michelle Williams or Anne Hathaway (the only core cast member not nominated for Oscar gold, disgustingly) get enough credit for having to navigate what I think are easily the most complex and difficult roles in the entire story. Lee goes to excruciating lengths to handle their roles with delicacy and tenderness, and the two of them must have had to walk such an intricately fine line to avoid vilifying Alma and Lureen. Sitting in a mostly full theater has reminded me how irony poisoned so much of my generation has become because the snickers and the giggles when Williams sees the two men passionately kissing in secret really troubled me. It’s such a haunting, devastating scene without even one word spoken. Two men finally expressing their truth to one another after four years of yearning and just on the other side of a window, a young woman’s entire world comes crashing down. There is such nuance and honest, raw emotion brimming out of each and every frame. Lee just allows these characters to simply… be. Have also become all the more convinced that Brokeback Mountain is one of the most exquisitely constructed films I’ve ever seen. Seeing it on the big screen, dead center in the middle row was like going to church. Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography is just so beautiful and grand. Whatever was playing on our screen was not quite Kino Lorber’s beautifully assembled 4K and you could tell, sitting up so close to it allowed me to take note of all the grain and the age on each frame. Gave it such a rugged, untamed texture. The first stretch or so when the two of them are herding the sheep in the mountain is just scene after scene of the most gorgeous Western scenery you’ve ever laid your eyes on. Said it in my first review but at its absolute strongest, it’s positively Fordian. Serene emphasis on the horizon and the terrain and the vastness of the frontier. As rugged and dangerous as you’d expect from any other offering of the genre. And then the later half when they’ve come down from the mountain and find themselves forced to return to “normal life” and so much of it can feel claustrophobic and cold and dreary. The two of them are existing, but are they really living? Their only real passion and it slowly eats away at them, leaving every waking moment feeling like blistered and pained gasps for whenever they’re apart. That Larry McMurtry screenwriting credit completely slipped past me on that first viewing. Maybe the most defining Western author of our time? Hard pressed to think of a man who has contributed so much in such varying shapes, forms and degrees to the all encompassing, far cast net that is the Oater. Most of all: I miss Heath. I know he’ll always be remembered for the role he died crafting but this is always going to be his masterwork for me now. What a quiet, understated but deeply raw and affected and pained performance. There’s a very heavy, weighted sense of soft spoken trauma and frigid invulnerability about Ennis and when that reservoir finally breaks against the flood, it can be equal bits charming and scary. A man who lives in complete denial of himself, and leaves nothing but broken hearts behind him because of it. An essential film. One of the best. Will never not break my heart. And to see it being painted on such a vast canvas deepened that sentiment tenfold. “You boys sure found a way to make the time pass up there.“