http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2006-02-21-brokeback_x.htm'Brokeback Mountain': Milestone or movie of the moment?
By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY
It has yet to win an Academy Award. It has never been the No. 1 film in theaters. Not that many people have seen it.
Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal star as conflicted cowboys in the much ballyhooed Brokeback Mountain.
Focus Features
Yet Brokeback Mountain already is The Movie. The film is the punch line of jokes, the subject of Internet parodies and the front-runner for the Oscars on March 5. Oprah plugged the gay-cowboy drama on her show. Howard Stern gave it a thumbs up. "Have you seen Brokeback?" has become a dinner-party Rorschach test of gay tolerance.
Brokeback also is freighted with expectations not foisted on a film in years. It leads a raft of social-issues films that are dominating the awards season. Some hail the picture as the one that will change not only how Hollywood portrays gay characters but also how gay men and lesbians are accepted by mainstream America. Those are mighty claims for a $14 million Western seen by fewer people in the three months since its release than who saw Dancing with the Stars on television last week. (Related story: Response 'surprisingly warm')
Admirers say the film is erasing Hollywood's homosexual stereotypes and raising consciousness of gay rights. Critics say Brokeback's destiny is to be remembered more for its marketing than its artistic achievements.
"It's brave to do a movie like that," says Terrence Howard, an Oscar nominee for best actor for his work in Hustle & Flow. "Sometimes you've got to say, 'To hell with audience reaction. We've got something to say.' We could be at the start of a cultural revolution."
Others maintain that Brokeback has become a tool of the political left and evidence of Hollywood's disconnect with middle America. Some in the film industry wonder whether the attention surrounding Brokeback isn't more the result of canny salesmanship than a seismic shift in sexual attitudes.
‘Brokeback’ leads the pack
Brokeback Mountain hasn’t hit the
$100 million mark in ticket sales,
which defines a blockbuster. But it
has earned more than the other
films up for the best-picture Oscar:
Brokeback Mountain: $72M
Crash: $53.4M
Munich: $45.4M
Good Night, and Good Luck: $29.3M
Capote: $22.1M
Sources: Nielsen EDI, Box Office Mojo
"It's ridiculous," film critic Michael Medved says. "Everyone knows about this movie because of relentless publicity, not great controversy or popularity. I have to remind myself it's a good movie."
No one seems more awestruck by the attention than Brokeback director Ang Lee, the Taiwanese-born filmmaker who says he's rattled by the reaction to his take on the Annie Proulx short story that inspired the film.
"It's a little overwhelming," he says. "I was worried about it just making its money back."
The story of two cowboys who struggle with their love for each other has been seen by about 12 million Americans and has taken in about $72 million. It leads all films with eight Academy Awards nominations and is widely regarded as the favorite to win the Oscars for best picture and director.
More important, Brokeback "is zeitgeisty," Entertainment Weekly's Dave Karger says.
The movie's oft-quoted line "I wish I knew how to quit you" is making the pop-culture circuit, a staple of the Lenos and Lettermans of late night. President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been plastered on spoof posters. The title also has become a derogatory term: Students at Gonzaga University in Spokane were reprimanded by the school this month for chanting "Brokeback Mountain!" to opposing basketball players, suggesting they were gay.
Encouraging discussion
Meanwhile, gay-rights groups are embracing the film in much the same way churches embraced The Passion of the Christ. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has established an online Brokeback resource guide with links to articles and support groups for gay cowboys and farmers. The Human Rights Campaign is issuing "Oscar party kits" with posters of Brokeback and cards that read "Talk About It" to encourage discussion of gay rights.
Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin expects Brokeback to prompt people to reconsider homosexual relationships in much the same way that The Defiant Ones, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner raised the consciousness on race relations in the late 1950s and '60s.
"The movie is in some uncharted waters, because it shows what it's like for two men to feel that kind of longing and passion for each other, and people aren't used to that," Maltin says. "No one movie is going to turn things around, but they can be building blocks. That could be this movie's legacy."
It will take some help from moviegoers. Charlize Theron, who won an Oscar for portraying a serial killer who was also a lesbian in 2003's Monster, says audience support for challenging fare, whether gay-themed or politically charged, is the key to a shift in Hollywood.
"People are always pointing the finger at Hollywood and saying, 'Hollywood isn't writing female leading roles, or they're not making socially relevant movies,' " she says. "The problem is that studios tend to lose money on these films. Why? Because audiences don't go. We've got to get the audience to see these films so studios don't feel a high risk in investing in them."
Felicity Huffman, who received a best-actress nomination for her transgender character in Transamerica, is concerned that Brokeback is facing resistance .
"I don't know if the red states have embraced it as much as the blue," she says. "If they did, it would speak to, hopefully, the inclusiveness that America is moving toward. I know there's a movement against that, but ultimately I think those things that unite us far outweigh those that divide us."
Other movies have explored conflicted sexual themes and found Oscar success. William Hurt won a best-actor Oscar for playing a gay prisoner in 1985's Kiss of the Spider Woman. Tom Hanks won best actor for portraying a homosexual lawyer in 1993's Philadelphia. Hilary Swank won her first Academy Award for her transsexual character in 1999's Boys Don't Cry.
One difference between Brokeback and those films, critic Emanuel Levy says, is that Brokeback attaches contemporary issues to a Hollywood archetype.
"It's a sweeping Western with tough cowboys, telling a time-tested love story that's simply about unrequited feelings," says Levy, author of All About Oscar. "On the other hand, it shows two men having intercourse, which is a first for a mainstream Hollywood film. That's what has people talking."
The time for message movies?
The film also benefits from its timing. George Clooney, who is nominated for an Oscar for directing Good Night, and Good Luck, says Brokeback represents a crop of movies with "something to say. Some people in Hollywood feel it's time to speak up about politics, or race or the media."
The result on the Hollywood product, Levy says, could be a shift away from the fey gay characters in TV shows such as Will & Grace and films such as The Producers and Rent. "I think we're going to see gay characters portrayed in a new, more complex way."
Not everyone agrees. Robert Knight of the conservative policy group the Culture and Family Institute points out that Brokeback's box-office tally is modest compared with Christian-themed movies such as Passion and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
"I don't think this movie means that Americans have accepted homosexuality," Knight says. "It's just the product of two decades of a pro-homosexual agenda by Hollywood and the media that's made it no big deal for something like this to be on TV or in the movies."
Some in the industry question what Hollywood believes. At the Berlin Film Festival last week, actor Ian McKellen said he doubts Brokeback will open doors for openly gay actors. "It is very, very, very difficult for an American actor who wants a film career to be open about his sexuality," says McKellen, who is gay. "The film industry is very old-fashioned in California."
Gay actor and writer Bruce Vilanch says that though he applauds Brokeback's illumination of a "new kind of gay person in Hollywood," the industry "is hardly out of the closet. I don't think you're going to see openly gay leading men or action heroes until you see openly gay football and hockey players. It's the last plateau of macho. But at least it has people talking."
And that, Judy Shepard says, might be all the movie needs to do. The death of her gay son, Matthew, in 1998 stirred a national debate over violence against gays. The murder is referenced vaguely in a scene in Brokeback.
Shortly before his death, her son gave her a copy of the story that inspired the film, Shepard says.
She doubts the movie will have an immediate effect on gay rights "because some people are ashamed to go see it. Even some of my friends — my friends — say it's just a gay cowboy movie and are afraid of something like that."
But when people can rent it privately, "I think they'll see it how I see it: as a story that's trying to say that you can't help who you fall in love with. If it opens just a few eyes to that, then it's done a good thing."
