There was an unusual 2 page spread on the broadsheet Strait Times devoting just on the movie Brokeback Mountain. The movie is certainly making waves on that small island!
Life! - Life Movies
Ain't no mountain higher
Ong Sor Fern , Film Correspondent
2873 words
15 February 2006
Straits Times
English
(c) 2006 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
You cannot choose who you fall in love with and Lee Ang's movie about two gay cowboys is a masterclass in film-making, even as it shows the endurance of love and thwarted desires
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (R21) 134 minutes/ Opens tomorrow/****
A LOT of Brokeback Mountain happens in the wide open spaces of Wyoming. But the story is really all about enclosures.
In fact, for a movie set in big sky country, it feels downright claustrophobic.
And that is a compliment to this quiet film, which has been nominated for eight Oscars. In its deliberate pacing and spare style, it dares to trust the audience will follow where the story leads.
Director Lee Ang's tender adaptation does justice to E. Annie Proulx's unsentimental 1997 short story about two gay cowboys.
Here, credit must be given to the terse Oscar-nominated script by novelist Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. They spin out Proulx's evocative 55-page story into a two-hour feature while staying astonishingly true to both its plot and its sensibility.
In the summer of 1963, monosyllabic Ennis del Mar (Best Actor contender Heath Ledger) and the more voluble Jack Twist (Best Supporting Actor nominee Jake Gyllenhaal) are ranch hands who bond over baked beans, whiskey and a campfire on Brokeback mountain.
But one night, when the weather turns frosty, they share a tent and more. Their sexual union is shot discreetly, cloaked in the shadows.
The next morning, Ennis grunts, 'I'm no queer' and Jack replies, 'Me neither'. Yet they have sex again and again.
They part company when the summer ends.
Ennis gets hitched to Alma (Best Supporting Actress nominee Michelle Williams), they have two daughters and life is a hard slog. Jack, meanwhile, marries pampered rodeo princess Lureen (Anne Hathaway in a breakout performance) and has a son.
But it is evident that neither man can forget the other. When Jack sends a postcard to Ennis four years later and they meet, their bottled feelings erupt in a passionate embrace.
Unable to deny each other, they continue to meet sporadically on hunting and fishing trips. The 20-year affair both sustains and destroys them as well as the people around them.
Alma, who sees the couple's tempestuous kiss, is shattered. Lureen, though unaware, matures into tight brittleness without ever fully understanding the causes of her husband's neglect.
People and desires
THIS movie will be beloved by film students and teachers in years to come as a masterclass in film-making.
Every directorial decision, from the visual language to pacing and editing, is made with clear-eyed vision and cinematic intelligence.
While this may suggest a certain cool calculation, Lee never forgets that his stories are about people and their thwarted desires. His all-embracing empathy means there is melancholy and regret, but no rancour nor recriminations, that feels all the more devastating because of its quietude.
The masterfully languid opening sets the restrained tone. A truck reduced to the size of a toy travels across a yawning landscape of green hills to the twang of an acoustic guitar.
The introduction of the two main characters takes place in a five-minute silent sequence - an eternity in screen time - carried solely by the stars' performances.
The actors deserve all the praise. Ledger disappears under the tough skin of the anguished, guttural Ennis. His childhood memory of a gay man bashed to death prevents him from trying for happiness with Jack.
Gyllenhaal maximises his liquid puppy dog eyes to convey Jack's open vulnerability, which morphs from youthful hope to middle-aged weariness and despair.
One can quibble that these two poster-beautiful actors are far from Proulx's gnarled, weatherbeaten ranch hands.
In the story, Jack is short, bucktoothed and a bit portly. Ennis is even further from the hunky Ledger, with Proulx describing him as possessing a 'high-arched nose and narrow face, a little cave-chested, with a small torso, and long, caliper legs'.
Besides this departure, the women who remained mainly in the background in the story are allowed more screentime in this film version.
This makes all the difference to the film. Williams and Hathaway's sympathetic portrayals make clear that they are neither judge nor jury, but also victims of a society which defines love in strictly exclusive terms.
The women provide crucial context for what is really a tragedy about the gay man's experience of the closet.
Ennis and Jack have grown up in a society which allows no room for alternative gender orientations. Unable to give voice to their very essence, unlike a straight couple who can get married, have children and live together, their relationship instead poisons everything around them.
The women in their lives are wrecked, sometimes without knowing why.
The most powerful scene in the movie draws directly from the book's most poignant image.
Ennis finds a pair of shirts in Jack's closet - an old shirt he thought he had lost is tucked neatly into Jack's shirt. These two inanimate objects, wrapped in an embrace their owners cannot acknowledge in public, convey more than words the tragedy of lives spent, literally and metaphorically, in the closet.
The reason Brokeback Mountain has been hailed as such a breakthrough is precisely because the scriptwriters and Lee have depicted such a central gay experience in the language of straight romantic cinema.
It is no accident that the movie's poster, with the two leads posed pensively against each other, recalls the poster for Titanic.
Casting pretty actors to play doomed lovers also follows the long-standing Hollywood tradition of putting beautiful people on the big screen to suffer in the name of passion.
The rowdy sex play in the story, described as 'quick, rough, laughing and snorting', is translated tactfully onscreen in the arty equivalent of soft-focus photography.
Lee's restraint in presenting such a potentially explosive story plays a big part in the movie's success.
But some reviewers have also criticised this aspect of the film. Ezine Salon.com, for example, noted that 'the filmmaking itself, self-consciously restrained and desiccated, is inert and inexpressive'.
But the movie's singular lack of stridency partly explains why it has not generated as much controversy as it might have.
In fact, other than the usual conservative grumbles and one Utah cinema which banned the movie from its halls, Brokeback has been making headlines more as a spectacular commercial success.
The US$14 million (S$22.7 million) independent film opened on only five screens in the United States on Dec 11 before expanding slowly and steadily through word of mouth and prize buzz. So far, it has made US$51 million.
In a relatively weak year for films, with small independents garnering all the positive reviews despite flaws, Brokeback is also ahead of the pack in terms of all-around achievement in writing, directing and acting.
More than that, the movie's liberal slant and humane tenor make it one of those movies which liberals love.
As the Chicago Reader newspaper's caustic critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, commented: 'This is the kind of tasteful tearjerker that's often overrated and smothered with prizes because it flatters our tolerance and sensitivity.'
But this opinion does an injustice to Lee's very palpable achievements in the movie, although one does suspect the film has attracted more than its fair share of raves because it is the perfect pop cultural success story to flaunt in the face of President George W. Bush's conservatism.
To be fair to Lee, he did not make the movie with the intention of becoming a cultural lodestone.
All this sound and fury is rather ironic considering the film at the centre of this brouhaha is all about understatement.
Brokeback makes its case for inclusion with such lowkey gravity that it packs more of a wallop than any soapbox rant ever can.
Its hushed heart will make this an enduring, if minor, classic in the film canon in time to come.
Brokeback Mountain is nominated for eight Oscars in the following categories: Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture, Best Cinematography and Best Music.
The Oscars will be held at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles on March 5.
sorfern@sph.com.sg
Once I had a secret love
Tay Yek Keak
A straight guy like me wept buckets at this movie about the sweet romance between two cowboys. Er, any girl fancy the shirt off my back?
I CRIED. At the end of Brokeback Mountain, I broke down.
Let me tell you this. I haven't cried at movies where boy breaks up with girl. Not even when boy breaks up with girl and the dog dies, the car is repossessed and the ship sinks.
I haven't cried when one gender aches for another gender so much it hurts in the cold, lonely nights.
I didn't even shed a tear when it happened to me. But this story, about two men who loved one another to pieces - it really moved me.
I need to clarify my credentials first.
Throughout my years of chummy camaraderie with my fellow men, in school, in the office, in the army, in the toilet at the football stadium, and on the one occasion I went fishing, anywhere, I've never felt an impulse to share anything with a guy in a bodily sense except maybe drink from the same can of Coke.
I'm as straight as an arrow.
But Brokeback Mountain has touched the liberal core in me, the part which says that ultimately what a person wants is entirely up to him whether it is pink, green, blue or Martian.
Sure I make the jokes about different kinds of people and I snigger at their ways, but the movie has humanised its subjects with such a beautiful, fatalistic love story I would probably, I hope, become a better man out of it.
It is, as many commentators have pointed out, a gay movie for straight people.
As I was watching the show, I kept messaging a friend to say that I have never seen two huggy, kissy fellas so happy together before.
Not even when Ben Affleck and Matt Damon won an Oscar together.
Here is where the idealised magic of cinema comes into play.
Lee Ang, the Hollywood outsider from Taiwan, that masterly auteur of the introspective, has said that in looking for the outsiders in his movie, he stopped casting once he saw Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal together.
Partnered up, they are Greek gods in Stetsons. Paired up, they are truly terrific actors.
Young, handsome, rangy, strapping and equal in height, they are the Marlboro Men not so much of cigarettes, but of the morning after pill.
A friend, who loved the film as much as I do, wondered if she would feel so much for it if it were about two old geezers in less photogenic heat.
She doubted it. Those two bucks are exactly the sort of guys I would want to look like or at least be with to corral the chicks in.
But they have eyes only for each other.
Love is a strange, unpredictable thing. It is already tough enough to read into the deep mysteries of girls, it's well nigh impossible to probe into two fellas' hidden, unspoken feelings.
In watching the shyer, repressive Ledger react to the more openly expressive Gyllenhaal, there is a mournful recognition of fate as well as a joyful celebration of the unexplained.
What they have, pointedly etched on their faces and the looks they give out of their forbidden confinement, is something that literally has no word for it.
In this tale of sad intimate destiny and sadder ultimate consequence, in the way you'd believe a man can fly in Superman, you'd believe the tender mercy of love soaring here.
Longing and loss are such erratic vagaries in life. They are completely out of our hands. If you are of a certain age, as I am, you would see Brokeback as wistful nostalgia.
You would need to understand regret and imperfection, and to regret the imperfection of perfection.
That every time Ledger's character Ennis Del Mar looks away and refuses to articulate in words the soul of his feelings, he is verbalising the fear of uncertainty and the pain of tentativeness.
I am moved by all this because it is so human and so believable.
Lee Ang understands tentativeness. He understands the tentativeness that comes from not knowing what is going to happen the next day, the next time.
That's why, as he has explained in interviews, when you see the show, the first act of love between both men is about passion.
The second is about commitment.
It's a commitment that slow-burns two decades in the story, able to rear its flourish only when given the rare chance to, a factor that sways you to feel pensively for these guys.
Suppression is such an emotive force.
Despite the hurt that it causes to the families in the story around them, it is an emotion blameless where men meant for each other only have the shirt in the closet to remember themselves by.
This groundbreaking film about manly, lonesome gay cowboys, thunderous in its daring, has made me look inward.
It actually makes me, as I write this on Valentine's Day, want to look for a girl to give a shirt to.
stlife@sph.com.sg
Lee's angst
Tay Yek Keak
THE sensitivity Lee Ang puts into Brokeback Mountain is the culmination of craft, experience, detail, refinement and an understanding of the human condition that he has been exploring in his movies.
The 51-year-old Taiwanese director, who is based in New York, is an outstanding, observant film-maker.
In all his films, he loves probing the vague abstractions that lie just beneath the normal veneer of society. In the evolution of art, he is a master.
Pushing Hands (1992)
A retired Chinese taiji master, who speaks no English, moves into the suburban New York home of his Chinese-American son and American daughter-in-law. Lee's first feature,
a cosy little culture clash about family and unfamiliarity, is raw but keenly observed with humour and humanity.
The Wedding Banquet (1993)
A gay Chinese American and his female tenant in Manhattan agree to a marriage of convenience to fool
his old-fashioned parents from Taiwan. Essentially about the father-son relationship, Lee's first foray into a gay theme (between the son and
his white boyfriend) is funny and light, but still laced with a few truths about acceptance.
Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)
A master chef lives with his three unmarried daughters in Taipei. The ingredients of life are stirred into their sumptuous dinners at home. A charming, delectable tale of family, love and tradition, Lee's change from father-son to father-daughters offers insightful portrayals that allow female viewers to identify with the women.
Sense And Sensibility (1995)
Lee's first venture into a big-time all-Caucasian film is driven by a ready-made Jane Austen romance
and scriptwriter Emma Thompson's propensity to take imperious charge. Still, it is a fine thespian's dramedy and its basic premise of two sisters - one impulsive and flirty while the other practical and suppressed - is the sort of human dichotomy that fascinates him.
The Ice Storm (1997)
Lee's most emotionally dispersed film, this is a populated drama set during an ice storm in upscale Connecticut, and is a study of suburbia angst. Against the background of a changing political and sexual landscape in 1973, two dysfunctional families cavort in an interlude of adultery, sex, drugs and moral decline.
The foibles and failings exposed in each role here form a little treasure trove for Lee's later characterisations.
Ride With The Devil (1999)
His penchant for internal turmoil is taken to the extreme as a small community near the Kansas border is torn apart by conflicting loyalties during the American Civil War.
As friend squares off against friend in a struggle over ideology, violence and revenge, the epic pretensions of this effort subsume Lee's quieter instincts making it rambling and unfocused.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Amid the sensational fight scenes on bamboo trees, in courtyards and a teahouse, there is a meditative rhythm to this wuxia classic that bears all the hallmarks of a Lee Ang film.
Hulk (2000)
In this raging beast simmering inside a tortured man, Lee should have found a perfect vehicle for his preoccupation with repression and duality.
Alas, in this summer outing, he could never penetrate the thick green skin of the almighty blockbuster dollar to make it the soul searcher that he wanted.
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
As the two young bucks embark on their forbidden union, this gay drama becomes Lee's most human story yet, a culmination of the compelling human condition which he has been examining throughout his films.
