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Director - Ang Lee

Writers - Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx

Director of photography - Rodrigo Prieto

Editors - Geraldine Peroni and Dylan Tichenor

Music - Gustavo Santaolalla

Production designer - Judy Becker

Produciers - Diana Ossana and James Schamus

Focus Features. 134 minutes. Rated R for nudity, sex scenes (homosexual and heterosexual), violence, and profanity.

STARRING: Heath Ledger (Ennis Del Mar), Jake Gyllenhaal (Jack Twist), Linda Cardellini (Cassie), Anna Faris (Lashawn Malone), Anne Hathaway (Lureen Newsome), Michelle Williams (Alma), Randy Quaid (Joe Aguirre) and Kate Mara (Alma Jr.).

A few words of introduction...

As a Christian, why would I bother to watch and review Brokeback Mountain, a film so many other Christians have condemned? Well, Christian film critics are often quick to condemn a film because they object to the lifestyles of the characters. Sometimes, they judge a work of art unfairly because of it. Fortunately, a few have given the film a chance and discovered that there is much to consider in Ang Lee’s acclaimed, award-nominated work. Having learned a long time ago the difference between a reaction and a review, I decided this was one I wanted to see for myself.

But there’s another reason I’ve given my attention to Brokeback Mountain. I’m an Ang Lee fan. I have been for many years. The Ice Storm is one of my favorite films — it’s full of memorable, convincing characters, and it's one of the few films to note that the sexual recklessness celebrated by the “free love” generation led to devastating consequences for those who became parents, and the damage stretched to mark the lives of their children. Lee is one of the few who dares to question the effects of self-indulgence, and he understands the cost of personal sacrifice. I was moved also by the beauty of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And Eat Drink Man Woman is a delightful piece of work. (While Hulk was much maligned by audiences and critics, I enjoyed it unusual meditative quality.) Lee has such an appetite for beauty that, even if I disagree with some of his convictions, I almost always find the natural beauty of his films, and the powerful performances he draws from actors, to be worth my time.

But Brokeback Mountain is about two homosexual men. Why, some Christians will ask, would I bother with such a story? I’m interested in people of all varieties, beliefs, and orientations. I have several gay friends, and I value their friendship, even if we disagree on some issues. They’ve played meaningful roles in my life. And, after all, I’m just not a big fan of prejudice and hate.

Brokeback Mountain is a film in which all kinds of people engage in all manner of wrongdoing. Yes, there are two men who hastily plunge into an intimate sexual bond, and as a result, their relationship narrows to become an unhealthy sexual obsession rather than a flourishing friendship and love  — they become enslaved to their lust, and it disrupts the rest of their lives. But there are also heterosexual people guilty of violent hatred, and heterosexuals who engage in hasty sex soon after meeting. Some commit adultery. One man is violent toward his wife. some utter spiteful, prejudicial slurs. Why would I ignore a film because it portrays one particular variety of sin? As with any story, it is interesting to see whether the choices and consequences mirror the truth, or if they have been skewed by the artist to represent a vision of the world that is false.

To undertake a review of this film is a monumental task, because feelings about it run so strongly and tempers easily flare. I hope that I can be clear and respectful, while sharing an opinion that is unpopular with the film’s fans. But I suspect that by praising the film for its virtues, I’ll receive wrathful letters from its detractors as well.

I welcome your responses to the review. Art is fulfilling its role when it provokes us to reflection, discussion, and growth. If anyone — Christian, pagan, homosexual, heterosexual — responds with rage and hatred, they make themselves guilty of the very “intolerance” that they probably think I am demonstrating. I assure you, my only “agenda” is to observe the story, what it shows us, what it implies about our lives beyond the cinema, and whether or not it stands up to the test of excellence and truth.

*    *    *

The story of Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain is about Jack Twist (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (played by Heath Ledger). They’re two cowboys — or, more specifically, two laborers who work for a time as shepherds. They’re fairly uneducated. Ennis has trouble showing his emotions. And Jake is so needy that he quickly sizes up Ennis to see if there is potential there for an intimate partnership.

The director illustrates their budding friendship with great sensitivity. It’s a rare and beautiful thing, seeing two men on the big screen develop a brotherly affection and care for each other. A deep and abiding friendship between men is hard to find at the cineplex… so rare, in fact, that in our sex-obsessed culture it is difficult for many to believe that men can be intimate friends without crossing over into a sexual relationship. (Consider all of the jokes that were made about Frodo and Sam while The Lord of the Rings films were in theaters.) There’s something wonderful happening as Jack and Ennis bond over their pain.

Through their sparse, ineloquent conversations, it becomes clear that Jack and Ennis have had hard lives, with unloving fathers, feeble connections with families, and an almost astonishing lack of understanding of their own religious heritage. Families and the church have failed these two men, it seems. When we meet Jack’s mother and father, we can see that he grew up in a miserable home. It’s not hard to believe that Jack’s complaints against his father are true, and that his need for warmth and affection, and for a father figure, would grow beyond all healthy proportion. When Jack uses the word “Pentecost,” he thinks it has something to do with fire and brimstone. Ennis doesn’t show evidence of having any firmer grasp of what Methodists are about. As a result, they're not deep thinkers. But they feel things very strongly.

In the moment Jack and Ennis plunge into sex together, their relationship changes. You’ll see it happen as the story progresses. Their deepening care and understanding stops. They become controlled by and obsessed with their sexual connection. Their days of rich and flourishing friendship are numbered. It is worth noting that the sex is not accompanied by any kind of promise, commitment, or intention to make this a lasting bond. In any kind of relationship, this is a rash and foolish step, almost certain to end in heartache. And sure enough, their partnership devolves into an increasingly contentious and damaging relationship that saps all other areas of their lives.

The characters seem to believe that this sexual bonding just “happened,” as if an irresistible force took over and they could not stop it — a favorite excuse of adolescents after they've done something wrong. But sexual attraction does not become sexual activity unless someone takes deliberate action. And if sexual appetites are cultivated beyond control, like drug addiction, that's a dangerous and unhealthy thing. This has little to do with real love, although it is often considered synonymous.

Jack and Ennis aren’t just quick to deny responsibility for their actions. They’re also quick to tell catastrophic lies. Both of them go on to get married to women who believe their promises of fidelity and adoration. They take on further responsibilities by having children and becoming providers and role models.

When they meet again and demonstrate that they still cannot control their sexual attraction to each other, they quickly and selfishly break their marital vows and betray the trust of their children. In doing so, they all but guarantee that their own children will grow up similarly hurt, distrustful, and needy.

Lo and behold, Jack and Ennis end up unhappy. By sentimentalizing the summer where they first knew some kind of care and intimacy, they prevent themselves from deeper, more fulfilling experiences beyond it. It’s an error of nostalgia, in a way, and it dooms them.

Of course, Jack and Ennis aren’t the only wrongdoers. Ennis has nightmarish memories of seeing the corpse of a homosexual man who was cruelly murdered by bigots. Joe Aguiree (Randy Quaid), the man who employs Jack and Ennis, refuses to re-hire Jack when he learns about how they spent their time on the mountain. If there are acts in this film worth condemning, count these among them.

In the end, we’re left with a mess. But we can’t call it “tragic,” because what we’ve seen has not transpired over a misunderstanding or folly. Ennis and Jack are both people worthy of love and care, but they make rash and foolish choices, and they are as responsible as anybody for the heartache that ensues.

If anyone in the film is a “tragic hero,” it’s Alma (Michelle Williams), Ennis’s wife, who believed his marriage vows and who endured betrayal and assault without returning evil for evil. She's the broken heart at the center of a tale about sin and consequences, sins committed by the two misguided lovers, by their families, their communities, and the churches that boiled the gospel down to a message of "fire and brimstone" instead of a message of love and grace.

*    *    *

Is Brokeback Mountain worth celebrating? In some ways, yes…

This adaptation of an E. Annie Proulx story, scripted by Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana, is getting a great deal of attention. And indeed, there is much to admire about the film, much deserving of praise.

Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (21 Grams, 8 Mile) has captured awe-inspiring beauty in the wilderness. The colors of the landscapes are radiant and rich in bloom, and cold as stone in winter. As Ennis and Jack guide rivers of sheep between the hills, it’s a beautiful visual metaphor (if inadvertently so) for how all of us need guides and helpers who can save us from our own wayward wills.

Like the exteriors, the interiors of the taverns, homes, and ranch buildings are colorful and convincing. This world feels real and lived-in.

It is clear from his performance here that Heath Ledger is, indeed, a talented actor. Personally, I think it’s easy to find stronger, more complex, more accomplished performances this year, including work by Daniel Day-Lewis (The Ballad of Jack and Rose), Viggo Mortensen (A History of Violence), David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck), Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line), Anthony Lapaglia (Winter Solstice), Daniel Auteil (Cache) — and Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote), another heterosexual man playing a homosexual character, whose performance was fascinating, subtle, and deeply moving. But if Ledger wins, as many predict he will, it will not be merely because he played a gay man who couldn’t control his sexual urges, but because he exhibited great ability here.

Jake Gyllenhaal is also deserving of praise for turning Jack into a three-dimensional character, as dismaying and misguided as Jack becomes. (Jack’s “love” for Ennis is so strong, that when he can’t have sex with Ennis he ends up wandering off with male prostitutes.)

The actresses are equally effective, if not more so. Alma (Michelle Williams), Jack's wife Lureen (Anne Hathaway), and another who should not go unnoticed — Jack’s mother (Roberta Mawell)—are brought to life with delicacy and deep emotion.

Of the three, Williams is given the most prominent role, and if she wins an Oscar for her performance, it’s because she passionately commits herself to it, body and soul. This is Williams' second strong performance in 2005, having also performed admirably in Wim Wenders' Land of Plenty. As the only character with a strong moral compass in evidence, she gives a warm, whole-hearted, and devastating performance.

Hathaway continues to show more and more potential, taking her few scenes and loading them with intelligence and palpably repressed emotions. Maxwell plays Jack’s mother with the same fragility she brought to her other role as a devastated mother whose son took the wrong path (Dead Man Walking).

*    *    *

… and in some ways, no.

But the film is also getting a lot of attention that it does not deserve. It’s being called “a landmark romance” and a groundbreaking film. Ledger and Gyllenhaal are being honored as brave and virtuous, as if they’re doing what’s never been done before. Tom Hanks played a gay man in Philadelphia thirteen years ago, and many others have followed in his footsteps, yet it’s still considered a major cultural event when straight actors play gay men.

But really, what’s so unusual here? Essentially, the story of Brokeback Mountain is the same as most stories of infidelity — two people who “can’t control” their desire for each other end up hurting others, telling lies, and excusing themselves of responsibility for their actions. People choose to be unfaithful. That’s the story of Fatal Attraction, of Hamlet, of Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere. Uncontrolled lust for something beyond appropriate limits is the root of stories as old as David and Bathsheba, even Adam and Eve. I don’t see why the film is such a media event.

My colleague J. Robert Parks has pointed out that Brokeback Mountain feels like a skipping stone, which is cast in one large arc and then, when it strikes the water, stumbles along weakening stretches until it finally sinks. He’s right — the film lingers romantically over the cowboys’ lustful plunge into misbehavior, and then hurries through the following decades as if there’s nothing there worth the same level of attention. This hurts the story’s integrity.

Further, the film sways our sympathies in favor of the two cowboys by making every other man in the film either pathetic or despicable or both. Each man in the movie is homosexual and kind, or hard-hearted and hateful toward gays. There is no heterosexual male portrayed as decent. (There’s a shopkeeper who seems nice, but later he’s shown as weak-willed.) This reinforces a false dichotomy that quite in vogue today — that people either approve of homosexual behavior or else they’re bigoted idiots. These are unfair distinctions. It may not have been Lee’s intention to skew things in this way, but the inclusion of one respectable heterosexual male would have been helpful in representing the real world.

But ultimately, Brokeback’s gravest error is in painting Jack and Ennis’s thwarted sex drives as a tragedy. The way they talk about the sex, it’s something that enslaves them, an impulse they cannot deny. Ennis grows increasingly alarmed as his sex drive enslaves him to its will, overpowering his mind and his heart. Jack is confined to even greater bondage, where his life is ruled by a desire to have sex with Ennis without restriction, to the point that eventually he demeans himself to seeking sex with other men as a consolation. Really… if lust is something that can just seize a person out of the blue and rob him of his freewill, shouldn't he be seeking help instead of permission?

Remember Frodo and the Ring of Power? The farther he carried it, the more it weakened his resolve and consumed his will. But Frodo made a journey to destroy the Ring.

Or think back to the junkies of Requiem for a Dream or the alcoholic played by Nic Cage in Leaving Las Vegas  — those addictions robbed the characters of their wills, and made them unable to commit themselves with integrity to anything else. So why are audiences willing to believe that drugs and alcohol… and the Ring of Power… were destructive influences, but not Jack and Ennis’s sexual obsession, when we see the same kind of negative effects resulting? As Werner Herzog so thoroughly explores in Grizzly Man, there are "invisible boundaries" that, if we cross them, cost us.

When Alma first learns about Jack, she asks her husband, “He somebody you used to cowboy with?” Ennis quickly claims they were just “fishin’ buddies.” Then, after beginning a series of blatant lies, he does not hesitate to passionately kiss Jack right outside his own front door, smashing his vows with wild abandon, and destroying Alma’s heart and the trust of his children in the process. This is not the stuff of a "love story," no matter how many critics call it that. This is lust, pure and simple. And regardless of how Ennis feels about it, he has made promises he must uphold.

Lee observes these developments sadly, and he has a big enough heart to let us feel Alma's pain. But he isn’t as interested in developing the relationships that Ennis and Jack cultivate elsewhere. He’s mostly interested in the sentimentalized homosexual relationship, the one ruled by lust, as if the only happy ending would be one in which Jack and Ennis are given over to their obsession.

We can surely feel compassion for Jack and Ennis, grieved that they grew up in such a harsh and lonely world, where they have not seen a good model of heterosexual intimacy, where they know nothing of God, and where they thus believe they can only find fulfillment in each other. By letting their sex drives lead them, they weaken their freewill. They submit to a master that does not know reason.

All of us, if we’re honest, can relate to the story of Jack and Ennis. Their story is the human story, from the Garden of Eden to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to Hamlet to The Lord of the Rings to Grizzly Man: At one time or another, we have all transgressed… we’ve pursued something we wanted, something that wasn’t what was best for us, without regard for the consequences our actions would have on each other, on the future, and on the world around us. Human desire oversteps its bounds, we are weakened by our inappropriate appetites, and it costs us something. That’s the real story of Brokeback Mountain.

*   *   *

The backlash against Brokeback Mountain

Many people, Christians and otherwise, let their objections to homosexuality turn into cruelty and prejudice, and as a result, the church itself has a reputation for tormenting homosexuals with condescension, hate, name-calling, and sometimes even violence. This sad history has continued in the religious press response to Brokeback Mountain.

The “Christian film reviewers” at Movieguide, for example, have condemned this film as “propaganda” for “perverts.” If this film was propaganda, why would Lee spend so much time showing the damage caused by Jack and Ennis’s behavior?

The Bible clearly states that we have all sinned, and are all deserving of God’s condemnation, so none of us should self-righteously execute judgment over others. Christ models for us how we should treat each other regarding sin. Consider the story of the adulteress, whom Christ protected from the stones of judgmental religious leaders. He comforted her. He loved her. Note that his love not only protected her, but that he helped her stand up and move on. He instructed her in the way that would be better for her. He loved her, while objecting to her lifestyle. His words to her were to the effect that she would have to choose between what was right… and what was easy.

The only sinners Christ loudly and publicly condemned with strong, harsh language to their faces where the self-righteous and hypocritical religious leaders of the day who stood around loudly judging others. The truth is, all of us have sinned, all of us have at times prioritized our wants over what is best. And thus we should speak about each other with concern, yes, but also with love and respect… especially if we dare claim to be speaking in the name of Christ.

I can almost guarantee that the things I have said already in this review will earn me some spiteful and hate-fueled messages. They will accuse me of having a “hateful” agenda against homosexuals.

Nothing could be further from the truth — and those who write such things clearly aren’t paying attention. It’s true that many who object to homosexual behavior become hateful and bigoted. But that doesn’t make all objectors into bigots. I write these things with great respect and love for those friends of mine who are homosexuals.

I object to some of their deliberate behavior, even though I accept that they have strong inclinations toward it. Why? I can only volunteer my personal beliefs on the issue... which you are free to take or leave.

• I believe that when we decide that something is right because it “feels natural,” we are in trouble. I am often inclined, even powerfully, to do things I should not. I look for other affirmations before I decide something is healthy. One of the sources that has never steered me to error or regret is the teaching of Christ. And I find enough in scripture to convince me that God is grieved when men and women stray from his design that they become intimate only with each other, in the context of love, family, and fidelity.

• I believe that there is meaning in design, and that men and women were designed for each other in quite obvious ways, that the union of two fundamentally different sexes is the fulfillment of a purpose, and that the union of man and woman often bears fruit is a sign of that blessing.

• I believe that children are also a sign as to why such a sexual union should happen in the context of a faithful heterosexual covenant, rather than hastily and without any form of accountability.

But while I object to choices that defy such design, I know that I too have chosen things that are unwise in the past. I wish I could revise my own personal history and change a few of my own poor choices, times when I rejected counsel and seized what I wanted without much regard for the way it could hurt others down the road. Thus, while I have room to object to the choices of others, I have no right to let that objection grow into self-righteousness, disrespect, or hate, just as no one has room to hate me for my opinion.

To again borrow a phrase from Professor Dumbledore, we all have to choose between "what is right and what is easy." If we decide that love, goodness, rightness, and natural urges are equal, we justify all manner of destructive behavior, from pedophilia to bestiality to murder. Compassion is essential and, yes, tolerance too. But we need to look beyond mere impulses to understand what is right and best. We need acknowledge that there is a higher path, contrary to mere appetite, one that is more rewarding, demonstrated by history, confirmed by fruitfulness, and delineated, at times, by God himself. Through this lens, it becomes easier to see that our natural world is broken, and that things don’t work the way they should, including our desires. It also becomes easier to show compassion for each other and our various blind spots.

Ultimately, God will deal with all of us for our choices. And all of us have fallen far short of earning his blessing. Fortunately, he offers grace to those who open themselves to it. Such love can inspire us to transcend those desires that drag us down and enslave us. It can set us free.