Brokeback Mountain : A Post-Classical Film - Movie Review Example

Brokeback Mountain”: A Post-classical film 2009 Although the film Brokeback Mountain (2005) directed by Ang Lee,belongs to the “new Hollywood cinema”, also known as 'Hollywood Renaissance', ( King, 2002) it has style typocal of a 'post-classical' film where one finds the influence of 'classical' filmmaking—a form that mainy amuses rather than challenging the audience , a form, a scriptwriting technique where the story is told clearly, where the story is narrated by a sequence of causes and effects, a description validates the theme and the plot´s presentation , where things take place in the story ‘because things are like that in real life’(Mira, Narration in Hollywood). Brokeback Mountain narrates a gay Shakespearean tragedy about two cowboys falling in love with each other while sheep-herding in summer in the mountains of Wyoming. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) went to Brokeback looking for work and wages without even realizing that they were two good-looking outsiders totally abandoned in the rough country with the only escape for their present sexual urges being sheep, horses, bears, or themselves. Such stories of loneliness have developed in the Western genre almost for about a century -- hard survivors in backwoods learning that a man does what a man has to. Brokeback Mountain is an expressive love story in the classical filmmaking tradition (Phillips, 2007). In this 'post-classical' film, the critics find the style to be predominated by the 'classical' filmmaking as far as type of narration, the sequence of causes and effects , character motivation and editing are concerned—all these aspects adding to a form that amuses rather challenging the audience. A classical movie can be broadly defined to be any movie made during the Hollywood studio system era that has been received significantly, either when it was released or later, by movie experts. Films like, Nosferatu, The Gold Rush, Monsieur Verdoux, Lime Light, Lawrence of Arabia, Intolerance, and The Phantom of the Opera are some examples of classic movies. Director John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), King Vidor's great historical-adventure story of colonial America, Northwest Passage (1940), Michael Curtiz-directed, big-scale adventure westerns like Dodge City (1939, Virginia City (1940) are also considered classic movies in a certain sense. Even while these films vary in their genre and style there are some commonly acknowledged types and styles of classic films, like Film Noir( in Hollywood the type extended over the period from the early 1940s to the late 1950m the films are generally black and white using bleak shadows and faintly lit scenes, the plots blending crime, eroticism, and violence, like what we find in Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard.) , Screwball Comedies ( films having likeable characters in absurd situations, where they act like screwballs: inconsistent and capricious. Example include It Happened One Night or Some Like it Hot), Science Fiction and Fantasy(at times, works of pure fantasy , exploring space and time l, different universes and realities, the atomic world, the terrors of science and the future of humanity. Examples, The Time Machine or Forbidden Planet., Epics and Sagas( like, Cleopatra and Ben Hur, The Private Life of Henry VIII or possibly, perhaps even the all-time box office champ, Gone With the Wind), Movie Musicals( like Busby Berkeley’s “Gold Digger, Singin’ in the Rain or the animated Snow White). The Westerns also have significant position in this list even if it is an essentially American art form depicting stories of the rambling American frontier, with the cowboys, gunslingers, bandits, ranchers, tycoons, floozies, settlers, Indians and army. There are silent westerns like the Great Train Robbery, musical westerns like Paint Your Wagon, satires like Cat Ballou, and “spaghetti westerns” like Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Early westerns use venerates the colony of the west, but wit its waning popularity in the ‘70s, this genre took a more biased view of the American Indian (Boeder, 2009). In certain sense, Brokeback Mountain ,is a Western in a (adapted from Annie Proul’s short story ) Yet it challenges certain aspects of classical Western by refusing to be identified to the easy label of ‘gay cowboy movie’, the masculine cowboy stereotype, the innumerable male couples in Westerns of the pre-1960 period, as James Stewart and Walter Brennan in The Far Country, the incessantly wrangling like yet absolutely loyal male couple, those singing cowboys with their fancy boots and western shirts and shocking suits . Certainly, Brokeback Mountain has a gay element- two male central character, two 19-year-olds, together in rural Wyoming, living close to the land and enjoying a loving, sexual relationship. But it differs from the classical Western John Wayne type of ‘Lonesome Cowboys’. In its place, the film deals with proscribed love, lost prospect, marital trickery and romantic integrity. What sets ‘Brokeback Mountain’ apart from the classical Western a radical project is that it is the first of its kind to become a real, stylish and rewardingly unbeaten weepy film from Hollywood. As the director places it, justly, it's a “great romantic tragedy like Romeo and Juliet”. And as we know in the classical Hollywood scriptwriting style , such film need problems, holes that need to be filled by the end . So, says Lee,” the two characters Ennis and Jack are in the American West which has macho and traditional values, love between two men was taboo. So everything they feel, they have to keep private". ,The film, Lee asserts is not a Western either. "Westerns are an invented movie genre about gunslingers, usually set somewhere in the back of the Grand Canyon. This is a more realistic portrayal of the West that people outside of America,…don't normally see." (Time Out, Review, Patterson, The Guardian, 2005, Lang, The Independent,2005). Brokeback Mountain as is pointed out in “Reading Brokeback Mountain”( 2007), a collection of essays on the film and the story (edited by Jim Stacy) , takes the position of a conduit between gay culture and mass culture. The essays delve into the "queering" of mass culture. Noah Tsika's "The Queerness of Country: Brokeback's Soundscape" says how the film uses, and challenges, the country music to establish its points. Xinghua Li's "From Nature's Love to Natural Love: Brokeback Mountain, Universal Identification, and Gay Politics" deftly place the film's attempt to become both particular and general. But then again, why did Brokeback Mountain, become not just a runaway hit but a media event? Was it that much of an innovative film that some queer viewers considers it to be, producing more trendy gay-themed films? The reason could be that the director deftly handles a very delicate and sensitive subject in a way that much of the homophobia existing today could finally ended. To deal with the question of choice in the subject of homosexuality, Lee showed it in way that evidently says that this was not a choice but something that can happen to many of us under certain situations. This means for everything in Brokeback Mountain there is a reason which according to Bordwell the falls under the three types of always motivation hierarchically organized in a classical Hollywood film where everything that is stressed in the film has a reason, which will ultimately be ‘used’ in the plot. If a character is taken be a good shot, he / she needs to prove it once more at a critical moment. In Brokeback Mountain, the film allies totally with Ennis’s standpoint. Given that he dictates the terms if the bond between them , and so we see the climax of the tragedy through his eyes only, a valid choice, judging by the Hollywood conventions( Mira, Narration in Hollywood , Wisniewski, Get Over It) . In this film Jack and Ennis are both engaged to watch over the herd of a local farm baron (Randy Quaid, meet on a Wyoming ridge one summer Exalting the pair’s experience on Brokeback Mountain Lee makes wide shots of sinuous rivers, travelling sheep, frail clouds and mountain view , over- appeasing te audience with the thin splendor of a Marlboro or Wrangler advert until, one night on the mountain, a drunken Ennis makes love to Jack --a love affair that agonizingly lasts over two decades yet never breaking the macho controls of the pastoral worlds where they belong. Both marry; both have kids; both meet now and then over 20 years for the bizarre rendezvous masked as a fishing trip. For Jack and Ennis, Brokeback Mountain remains the symbol of a state of mind, an unfeasible nirvana. ‘Brokeback got us good,’ says Jack to Ennis as their tense and clandestine affair spans over the years. Always taking suggestion from Proulx’s original story, Lee and his screenwriters Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana skillfully present the pair’s married, post-Brokeback lives reminding the viewers us of the traditional nature of their domestic lives( the minor subplots that strengthen the main theme in any classical film, distracting , yet adding colors to it). Shot mainly in Alberta(cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto), Canada's stunning mountain territory , Brokeback Mountain" starts with Ennis Del Mar waking in his trailer parked on the Wyoming cattle farm where he has been working, The tagline of the film, “Love is a force of nature”, hints at the two men drawn together by the power of nature, the camera suggesting Brokeback Mountain to be an inseparable part of their bond, as it is only on that mountain that they can really be free in expressing mutual love without social restraints interfering on them. From this general shot, the Camera tends to follow scene´s focus, outside the rancher's office where the two wait to hear about work, Ennis stooping timidly behind his hat, Jack lean bending against his truck with an almost bend openness, to the tear-jerking scene when Ennis goes to see Jack's boyhood room, the plot advancing by a overtly agonizing feeling of desire—a technique often applied in the Hollywood classics, which according to Alberto Mira makes a plot advance later in the film(Mira, Narration in Hollywood, Brussat spiritualityandpractice.com). Movies of such sort often bring into mind abut other movies, whatever their locale. "Brokeback Mountain" begins in 1963, the year "Hud"( with Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, and Brandon De Wilde star as three generations of a ranching family, the film focusing on the difference of father and son, the old values verse the new world) introduced an innovative kind of Western, a post-classic sort, a funeral song for its own genre. Adapted from Larry McMurtry's debut novel, "Horseman, Pass By" that perked up the image of the cowboy in literature, "Hud," directed by Martin Ritt and set in Texas, gave audiences a new concept of Western. "Brokeback Mountain" starts just as "Hud" did: with a solo guitar line and a car on a highway, depicting a shift in the pattern of the classical Western (Phillips, 2007). The sexual sessions between the two cowboys who have never heard the term gay (in 1963, the time context of the story, it was still a word moving into the commonplace) are depicted by Proulx as "quick, rough, laughing and snorting." That's how Lee sets the film about the physical love between the two young men in the little tent. Next morning, a naive Ennis mutters, "I'm no queer" to which the romantic Jack replies, "Me neither." Still, they repeat the experience, in the daylight and at night, their unsaid passions blasting such severely that can’t be extinguished (Holden, The NY Times, 2005). Tragically evoking the costs of such love-- not just gay people but their families and loved ones -- the film is certainly a dividing line, ventilating the proscribed and it is intensely humanist. Ang Lee treats the original story with such respect that it's as if the whole movie were made from the printed story (Hornaday, Washington Post). But ‘Brokeback Mountain’ becomes more interesting because of the delicate differences in character portrayals between Jack and Ennis, Jack being more lively, more romantic, riding the rodeo and making impractical plans for them to live together. Ennis is a puritan and cautious, taking resort to violence, controlling his emotions and making excuses for the languish that shapes his life. The film is his tragedy; it becoming glaringly evident that he left his soul on Brokeback Mountain, a difficult act to observe and acted superbly by Heath Ledger, with a growingly sad and concerned performance evoking seclusion. And all as he knows what it means to be in love with man as a man (Review, Time Out London Issue 1844). The film has the traits if the old Western classics, those American films of the 1940’s and 1950’s having a melancholic tribute to the early days of the open, wild American frontier ,one of the oldest, most lasting and supple genres and one of the most typically y American genres, the genre that frequently speaks about the wilds and the slashing of nature, in the name of civilization, or the deprived territorial rights of the natives Settings include ranches, the remote farmhouses, the jail, the stable(the cowboy hero having a special horse--'faithful steed'), the village main street, or small frontier towns, etc. Other elements include saddles, lassos and revolvers, bandannas and buckskins, canteens, stagecoaches, gambling, long-horned cattle and prostitutes with golden heart, and more. Usually, the theme of the western film is based in typical conflict - good vs. bad, the indigenous white hat vs. black hat, man vs. man, new arrivals vs. indigenous Americans ( depicted as savage Indians), colonizers vs. Indians, humanity vs. nature, civilization vs. backwoods or anarchy, villains vs. heroes, sheriff vs. gunslinger, law and order vs., disorder, the tough individualist vs. the society, the East vs. West, immigrant vs. nomad, and farmer vs. industrialist and like that(filmsite.org). The Western genre's visual ability has influenced . This is a momentous film because it is the first Hollywood movie exposing the homoerotic tension in American culture that literary critic Leslie Fiedler, who applied psychological theories to American literature, detected in his debatable 1948 Partisan Review essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey" depicting the relationship between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a fugitive slave, as an unaware romantic bond shared by two males of unlike races as they run away from the confines of civilized women, identifying that bond as a regular subject matter in American literature. Fiedler's psychological theory could be applied to the Lone Ranger and Tonto, popular American Western character written by George Tredle and Fran Sriker that expanded to include a long line of westerns movies, from “Red River” to “Midnight Cowboy” to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” where the pure male tie dared not to look at its dark side. Both Ledger and Gyllenhaal make this painful love story really clear, Ledger magically and strangely vanishing under the skin of his wiry character-- a great acting almost reminding, the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn. The pain and discontent felt by Jack, more malleable, more self-aware and tolerant, frequently seen in Gyllenhaal's gloomy, hopeful eyes (Holden, 2005). "Brokeback Mountain" is not a classic American film, but certainly it has many element as to redefine classicism from a post-classical viewpoint. It is from this film that America's whiny private doors opened for a gay cowboy path to thrive. However, in the mainstream of American society, particularly in sports and the army, those doors still remain closed. Another recent film, “Jarhead”, a 2005 film based on U.S Marine Anthony Swoffordls 2003 Gulf war memoir, (where Gyllenhaal plays the role of Swofford, jarhead being the slang referring Marines), points out how any kind of male behavior is seen as yielding and womanly within certain blocked male ambience causing violence and how that repressed sexuality is channeled into warfare. Yet "Brokeback Mountain" is in the end not about sex (but about love: love stuttered into, love disenchanted, love held mournfully in the heart, an archetypal classic film theme (Holden, 2005). The Western has always been the most perfectly homo-social types—often obsessed to the selective barring of women as having any major significance apart from their sexual charms. In Brokeback Mountain we find ah exception. Here, the sex scenes may be hot, but it's hard to believe that Madonna found them "shocking Everything here is the sex scenes may be hot, but it's difficult to believe that Madonna found them "shocking." Everything here is classy and far more credible than the usual (Hoberman 2005). Brokeback Mountain is not simply a daring renaissance of the modern Western, it is a perceptive and poignant search of compassion evoking the great proscribed love troika of Douglas Sirk's 1955 romance All That Heaven Allows(starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in a story about a wealthy widow and a younger designer in love), Reiner Werner Fassbinder's 1974 film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (the story of a 39 year old Moroccan guest worker falling in love with a 60-year-old widow), and Todd Haynes' 2005 film Far from Heaven that deals with a 1950s housewife, living in an uptown and seeing her apparently wonderful life starting to crumble. In Brokeback Mountain we find Jack and Ennis are not only under social restraints, but by self-.devastation also. Ennis's worrying over a more lasting loyalty to Jack is both real and made-up. He is prone to violence as a futile cure for his sexual impulses-- a logical preservation instinct, wholly human, even if that condemns him to hell. Brokeback Mountain is free of Hollywood superciliousness, despite the presence of macho outfits. There is not one character, that turns into skit .The movie depicts a victory of spare dialogue, as actors talk with their gestures, with their faces and bodies. Ang Lee, here surpasses his already outstanding work with actors. For example, how Gyllenhaal as Jack decides not to catch an askew glance of his naked buddy. As in Proulx's story, Jack had "some weight in the haunch and his smile disclosed buckteeth," while Ennis had a "high-arched nose and narrow face . . . scruffy and a little cave-chested." In the film's, both Gyllenhaal and Ledger are categorically prettier than Proulx's imagination. That, of course, does not lessen their acting talents. As a man tongue-tied by childhood gloom, Ledger's words move slowly down his throat before he could start talking. His eyes look being burnt from being exposed to too much brutality, his mouth warped and thin over the years, yet he has Ledger a great compassion for Ennis. Jack , on the contrary is the more sociable and brash s of the two, but his hurt is just as intense, his fervor all the more crushing by its tragic eventuality. And it is Jack's dream that makes Brokeback Mountain to attain its emotive appeal, joining a great tradition of of such a longing already seen in Hollywood classics like, West Side Story, in Of Mice and Men, and in Midnight Cowboy (Kennedy, 2006). Works Cited Brokeback Mountain (2005), Directed by Ang Lee; written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx; director of photography, Rodrigo Prieto; edited by Geraldine Peroni and Dylan Tichenor; music by Gustavo Santaolalla; production designer, Judy Becker; produced by Ms. Ossana and James Schamus; released by Focus Features. Running time: 134 minutes. King, Geoff, New Hollywood Cinema, I.B Tauris, London, 2002. pp.1-4 Alberto Mira, Narration in Hollywood Classical Cinema Phillips, Michael, review, Brokeback Mountain, The Tribune, August 27, 2007, http://chicago.metromix.com/movies/review/movie-review-brokeback-mountain/161081/content Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/films/films.php?id=10065 Review, .Time Out, London Issue 1844:, December 21 2005 - January 4 2006 Patterson, John ,Way out west, The Guardian, Saturday 31 December 2005 Lang, Kirsty , 'It's not a gay movie', interview with Lee, The Independent, Friday, 16 December 2005 Wisniewski, Chris, Get Over It, http://www.reverseshot.com/legacy/winter06/yearinreview/goi_brokeback.html Boeder Laurie, A Guide to Classic Movie Genres and Styles, http://classicfilm.about.com/od/classicmoviereviews/a/GenreGuide.htm Stacy, Jim (ed.) Reading Brokeback Mountain: Essays on the Story and the Film Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2007 http://www.filmsite.org/westernfilms.html Holden, Stephen, Riding the High Country, Finding and Losing Love, Review of Brokeback Mountain, The New York Times, December 9, 2005 Hornaday, Ann, Editorial Review.Washington Post, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/brokeback-mountain,1106147.html Hoberman, J. , Village Voice, Blazing Saddles, Review, Village Voice, November 22, 2005 Kennedy, Matthew Men in Love, Bright Light Film Journal, February 2006, Issue 51 , Read More

In certain sense, Brokeback Mountain ,is a Western in a (adapted from Annie Proul’s short story ) Yet it challenges certain aspects of classical Western by refusing to be identified to the easy label of ‘gay cowboy movie’, the masculine cowboy stereotype, the innumerable male couples in Westerns of the pre-1960 period, as James Stewart and Walter Brennan in The Far Country, the incessantly wrangling like yet absolutely loyal male couple, those singing cowboys with their fancy boots and western shirts and shocking suits .

Certainly, Brokeback Mountain has a gay element- two male central character, two 19-year-olds, together in rural Wyoming, living close to the land and enjoying a loving, sexual relationship. But it differs from the classical Western John Wayne type of ‘Lonesome Cowboys’. In its place, the film deals with proscribed love, lost prospect, marital trickery and romantic integrity. What sets ‘Brokeback Mountain’ apart from the classical Western a radical project is that it is the first of its kind to become a real, stylish and rewardingly unbeaten weepy film from Hollywood.

As the director places it, justly, it's a “great romantic tragedy like Romeo and Juliet”. And as we know in the classical Hollywood scriptwriting style , such film need problems, holes that need to be filled by the end . So, says Lee,” the two characters Ennis and Jack are in the American West which has macho and traditional values, love between two men was taboo. So everything they feel, they have to keep private". ,The film, Lee asserts is not a Western either. "Westerns are an invented movie genre about gunslingers, usually set somewhere in the back of the Grand Canyon.

This is a more realistic portrayal of the West that people outside of America,…don't normally see." (Time Out, Review, Patterson, The Guardian, 2005, Lang, The Independent,2005). Brokeback Mountain as is pointed out in “Reading Brokeback Mountain”( 2007), a collection of essays on the film and the story (edited by Jim Stacy) , takes the position of a conduit between gay culture and mass culture. The essays delve into the "queering" of mass culture. Noah Tsika's "The Queerness of Country: Brokeback's Soundscape" says how the film uses, and challenges, the country music to establish its points.

Xinghua Li's "From Nature's Love to Natural Love: Brokeback Mountain, Universal Identification, and Gay Politics" deftly place the film's attempt to become both particular and general. But then again, why did Brokeback Mountain, become not just a runaway hit but a media event? Was it that much of an innovative film that some queer viewers considers it to be, producing more trendy gay-themed films? The reason could be that the director deftly handles a very delicate and sensitive subject in a way that much of the homophobia existing today could finally ended.

To deal with the question of choice in the subject of homosexuality, Lee showed it in way that evidently says that this was not a choice but something that can happen to many of us under certain situations. This means for everything in Brokeback Mountain there is a reason which according to Bordwell the falls under the three types of always motivation hierarchically organized in a classical Hollywood film where everything that is stressed in the film has a reason, which will ultimately be ‘used’ in the plot.

If a character is taken be a good shot, he / she needs to prove it once more at a critical moment. In Brokeback Mountain, the film allies totally with Ennis’s standpoint. Given that he dictates the terms if the bond between them , and so we see the climax of the tragedy through his eyes only, a valid choice, judging by the Hollywood conventions( Mira, Narration in Hollywood , Wisniewski, Get Over It) . In this film Jack and Ennis are both engaged to watch over the herd of a local farm baron (Randy Quaid, meet on a Wyoming ridge one summer Exalting the pair’s experience on Brokeback Mountain Lee makes wide shots of sinuous rivers, travelling sheep, frail clouds and mountain view , over- appeasing te audience with the thin splendor of a Marlboro or Wrangler advert until, one night on the mountain, a drunken Ennis makes love to Jack --a love affair that agonizingly lasts over two decades yet never breaking the macho controls of the pastoral worlds where they belong.

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