Brokeback Mountain

Film depicts emotional scene the way it would likely be

by Junius

Going to see Brokeback Mountain knowing what everybody now knows about it is a bit of a tense experience. The film’s lyricism is not enough to engage us when we are nervously waiting for “it” to happen. Though taking place in beautiful mountain settings, the early scenes seem to collude with our anxiety, being a patchwork of almost perfunctory events just holding us off until the first frenzied consummation.

And then it’s out, that feared moment large on the screen. And it’s all right. It’s okay. It’s what it would be like. It has an animal thoroughness about it—not quite impromptu on the part of one of them, and on the other, a surprise that turns instantly into a clear line of physicality. Truth to say, and contrary to expectation, it is the high spot of the film, because it is the high spot of the relationship. After that, the two marriages are tawdry and the intervals are a wrenched dream—like between “fishing trips” which try to recapture that moment. We are not sure that they do actually recapture it. Remembered emotion seems to be the best thing they can have. In these matters, apparently, primacy is everything, and the rest is pretty hard to take.

Does Brokeback Mountain, despite admirable acting, give us an experience that we want to go through? Everybody in the film finds the situations distasteful at one time or another. A good part of the audience will follow their lead in this. There’s a cartoon in the most recent New Yorker of a couple of city guys obviously living together, and one is in longjohns and a cowboy hat. He is holding out another cowboy hat to his partner, who is working at his computer. The partner, looking up from his work and taking it in, says, “And what if I don’t want to be Jack or Ennis?” Brokeback Mountain fails to persuade us, probably most of us anyway, that we would want to be Jack or Ennis, even for a moment.

But even less would we want to be Julian or Danny of Matador. It had seemed that Matador might have been able to offer a comic mask to Brokeback’s tragic mask, being a sort of “buddy” film. But there’s hardly a moment in Matador when the main character is being honest with his “friend” or with the audience, except when he becomes a genuine basket case.

Brokeback Mountain, a film about romance, is down-to-earth and true. It is Matador, in romanticizing a faux down-to-earth character, that is the obscene film.

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