Actually I watched the Charlie Rose interview of Ange Lee yesterday on this website. According to Ange Lee, she knew and was lying to Ennis. I like my interpretation better. Ha! - Nancy
Hmmm....might Ang have not answered exactly that "Lureen knew before the phone call of the full nature Ennis & Jack's relationship" question? It really seems Lureen understands more mid-phone-call.
My personal take on all of this is:
--Rumors of Jack's activities had gotten around in some circles around Childress.
--Jack was indeed beaten to death in a bashing.
--Lureen knew the circumstances of this and that her husband messed around with one or more men, either before the beating or in the rumors and loose talk after the beating.
--The story of the exploding tire was fully fabricated to hide the embarrassment of the true nature of Jack and why he was killed.
When we get to the phone call itself, the details here are what make this all come together for me:
(a) When Lureen recognizes that Ennis is the Fishin' Buddy, or Huntin' Buddy, there is *no* hint of disdain whatsoever. So I don't think she knew what Ennis meant to Jack. Even "Jack kept his friends' addresses in his head" would have had a different tone if it really was "Jack kept
his cheating homosexual lovers' addresses in his head"
(b) The telling of the story of Jack's death is very much wrote and unemotional...cold, precise, told a million times. Yes, when any of us have a story of a loved one's death, we probably tell it a million times as part of the grieving process. But in that case we often kind of relive it a bit as we tell it. Lureen seems more annoyed than grieving in telling the story. Also the precision of the detail and how it is spoken...the RIMMMM of the TAAAAR...don't quite sit right with me. Liars often put too much specific detail in their lies to try and make them seem more real and plausible. Why not just say that the tire exploded and hit Jack in the head and knocked him out? Why the whole broke his jaw, etc?
(c) The way she speaks of Brokeback Mountain, and how it might even be a pretend place, drips of contempt for how Jack was too much of a dreamer and always had schemes that didn't pan out, but it doesn't sound like "he wanted is ashes scattered where he cheated on me with other men". She didn't know at that moment or it would have all come out differently. Frankly I wonder if she'd even have told Ennis. But when Ennis tells Lureen what Brokeback was, it seems very clear to me that THAT is when she puts two and two together. The pause she gives, and the muffled sigh, and her eyes, all tell us this. And then when she struggles to say "well, he said it was his favorite place...I THOUGHT it meant to get drunk"...how much more do we need to see that she didn't understand about Jack until THAT MOMENT? Yet I believe that if she did not know about Jack's affairs with men before this point, there wasn't enough to piece together than Ennis was his long-time lover. No, she had to know what Jack was doing before the call to put it together on the phone the way she did. And with the low credibility of the how-Jack-died story (most importantly in how Lureen tells it, not really the story itself), that makes me believe that Jack was indeed bashed.
