Brokeback Mountain, A Break Through or Expected Revelation?

This film that won the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion is about to be released into movie theaters. One idiot playwright who I won't name from Montana (Montana mentality?) said she never met a gay cowboy. Did she expect them to wear lace? The movie is about why you may never expect to recognize a gay cowboy. Or a gay football player, or anyone gay in what is considered to have a macho occupation.

Here's the Boston.com column addressing the significance of the film (I've copied and pasted as one has to register to read it).l


'Brokeback Mountain' turns a short story into a Hollywood first
By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff | December 11, 2005

NEW YORK -- What struck screenwriter Diana Ossana when she first read Annie Proulx's short story ''Brokeback Mountain" nearly a decade ago was the way it snuck up on her. It started to unfold as an iconic Western tale of male bonding and rugged landscapes, a glimpse of two young men with sheepherding jobs on a Wyoming mountain. When they had sudden sex in a pup tent, several pages in, the readers were as shocked as the characters.

Few will see ''Brokeback Mountain" in theaters with that kind of blank slate. Since production began on the screenplay Ossana and Larry McMurtry adapted, hype over the ''gay cowboy movie" has reached stratospheric levels. The film, directed by Ang Lee, took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. Heath Ledger's lead performance, as a clench-jawed cowboy who can't put words to his feelings, has garnered Oscar buzz. And threaded through the fan sites, the chat rooms, the adulatory magazine stories, is talk about the way this film will change the world.

If the right people go to see it.

There is a solid argument to be made that ''Brokeback Mountain" is the first mainstream American film to portray gay love straightforwardly -- not in the context of an issue film about AIDS, not as a campy side plot, but as old-fashioned melodrama, with moony eyes and explicit sex.

''I loved 'Dr. Zhivago,' " producer James Schamus says. ''I wanted to see if I could help get a movie out there that delivered some of that experience."

And in a culture that remains deeply divided over gay rights, the choice Schamus has made -- to promote a movie about gay love as a movie about gay love -- is, in a sense, as provocative as the subject matter.

True, the publicity shots don't show the leads kissing (or, for the most part, even looking at each other). But when Schamus started planning the marketing campaign, he says, ''I wanted to see all the posters of the most romantic movies ever made."

That's why the ''Brokeback Mountain" poster deliberately invokes the poster from ''Titanic." And why the trailer, with its sweeping music and cherry-picked dialogue, wraps Lee's often-understated film in a fair amount of schmaltz. The line ''I wish I knew how to quit you" seems almost argumentative in Proulx's story, but it comes across here as high drama.

The trailer has aired in art house theaters, as might be expected. But it has also run with mainstream fare, from the chick flick ''In Her Shoes" to the biopic ''Walk the Line." Schamus says a friend saw it at a screening of ''Rent" and reported that the audience applauded. Lee saw the trailer at a recent Calgary Flames game, not far from where the filming took place; the hockey crowd, he said, was ''very quiet."

But Schamus hopes the themes of rich romance and impossible love will drive women to the theaters -- perhaps dragging husbands and boyfriends along.

''What was the last great, epic, sweeping romance?" he asks, and a few minutes later, he settles on an answer. ''The Bridges of Madison County," he announces, is ''actually one of the few films that lines up."

If it were truly a traditional love story, of course, ''Brokeback Mountain" wouldn't have the hype, or the history. The screenplay famously languished in Hollywood for eight years, as stories spread about directors latching on, stars loving the script, and managers steering their clients away.

''Agents didn't want their beloved actors to take this risky role," McMurtry says. ''That's the bottom line."

Schamus, a longtime collaborator with Lee, said he figured the themes would appeal to the director's sensibilities. And after ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and ''The Hulk," Lee says, he was eager to do something quiet and small. Despite its rich landscapes and explosive subject, ''Brokeback Mountain" is an intimate film, with few characters, sparse dialogue, and a focus on interior emotions.

That's what attracted Ledger to the role of Ennis Del Mar, the taciturn ranch hand whose struggle to balance love and social obligation is at the movie's core.

''I never personally felt like I had a career at risk," Ledger says. ''If anything, it felt like an opportunity for me to mature as a person and as an actor, which is what I'd kind of been looking for."

And of shooting sex scenes with costar Jake Gyllenhaal -- the most striking one, violent and unflinching, was filmed in one morning, in 13 takes -- Ledger is almost perfunctory.

''I hate to break it to you, but it really wasn't [difficult]," Ledger says. ''Once you do the first take, you're kind of over it."

The movie's stars have been struggling, of late, to tread the line between downplaying the movie's gay themes and exploiting them. Controversy makes for good press, after all; ''courageous" isn't a terrible label during awards season. And some fans have anticipated the film as a cultural milestone.

''It's sweet to be walking down the street with Heath and have people come up and just say, 'Thank you,' " says Michelle Williams, who plays Ennis's wife -- and gave birth to Ledger's daughter this fall.

Indeed, as much as he touts the film's mainstream appeal, Schamus also raves about an Internet response that has centered on a very particular crowd. The movie's website posts confessionals from fans, some of whom admit to secret love affairs with same-sex soul mates. Internet buzz has marked the film as a triumph for gay rights.

''I think people can learn just as much about the struggle that gay men have watching this movie as they could watching a movie about AIDS or Stonewall," says Andy Towle, a cultural critic whose website, www.towleroad.com, gets 20,000 visitors, most gay, each day. The site devoted so much space to ''Brokeback Mountain" that producers invited Towle to a special screening last fall. He has been gushing ever since.

Critics have been largely effusive, too, touting the film as ''classic" and ''groundbreaking." But it's unclear how much of that praise is reaction to what the film has come to represent, says Brandon Gray, president and publisher of boxofficemojo.com, an online movie publication and box office tracking service.

''It's like a badge of honor, for this movie, for straight critics to show how hip and cool and not homophobic they are," Gray says.

But mass audiences don't live in a film-festival bubble, Gray says. And some reportedly have chuckled at the trailer -- not because they're homophobic, he suggests, but because it seems maudlin and manipulative. To those untouched by political goals or movie industry chatter, he says, the gay theme may feel like tokenism rather than truth.

''It doesn't come off as a profound thing," he says. ''It comes off as, 'Let's try to do an unrequited love story, but with gay cowboys.' That's why it causes giggles. That's why it will have a limited mainstream audience."

In a sense, the risks to the filmmakers are small. ''Brokeback Mountain" was made on a modest budget -- Focus Features officially says it cost well under $20 million, compared to $150 million for the epic ''Chronicles of Narnia" -- and doesn't need great audiences to succeed.

Still, Schamus and Lee have higher goals, and some precedent for thinking that a film could lead to change. Some 13 years ago, they collaborated on ''The Wedding Banquet," a Taiwanese comedy about a gay New York couple that plans a sham wedding to please one man's conservative parents. The day after it premiered in Taipei, Schamus says, the local gay and lesbian organization listed its phone number for the first time.

And the movie, Lee says, helped to spark a shift in what filmmakers are willing to do, and what audiences are willing to accept.

In Taiwan, Lee quips, ''only gay movies get made these days."

Joanna Weiss can be reached at [email protected].

NEW YORK -- What struck screenwriter Diana Ossana when she first read Annie Proulx's short story ''Brokeback Mountain" nearly a decade ago was the way it snuck up on her. It started to unfold as an iconic Western tale of male bonding and rugged landscapes, a glimpse of two young men with sheepherding jobs on a Wyoming mountain. When they had sudden sex in a pup tent, several pages in, the readers were as shocked as the characters.

Few will see ''Brokeback Mountain" in theaters with that kind of blank slate. Since production began on the screenplay Ossana and Larry McMurtry adapted, hype over the ''gay cowboy movie" has reached stratospheric levels. The film, directed by Ang Lee, took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. Heath Ledger's lead performance, as a clench-jawed cowboy who can't put words to his feelings, has garnered Oscar buzz. And threaded through the fan sites, the chat rooms, the adulatory magazine stories, is talk about the way this film will change the world.

If the right people go to see it.

There is a solid argument to be made that ''Brokeback Mountain" is the first mainstream American film to portray gay love straightforwardly -- not in the context of an issue film about AIDS, not as a campy side plot, but as old-fashioned melodrama, replete with moony eyes and explicit sex.

''I loved 'Dr. Zhivago,' " producer James Schamus says. ''I wanted to see if I could help get a movie out there that delivered some of that experience."

And in a culture that remains deeply divided over gay rights, the choice Schamus has made -- to promote a movie about gay love as a movie about gay love -- is, in a sense, as provocative as the subject matter.

True, the publicity shots don't show the leads kissing (or, for the most part, even looking at each other). But when Schamus started planning the marketing campaign, he says, ''I wanted to see all the posters of the most romantic movies ever made."

That's why the ''Brokeback Mountain" poster deliberately invokes the poster from ''Titanic." And why the trailer, with its sweeping music and cherry-picked dialogue, wraps Lee's often-understated film in a fair amount of schmaltz. The line ''I wish I knew how to quit you" seems almost argumentative in Proulx's story, but it comes across as here as high drama.

The trailer has aired in art house theaters, as might be expected. But it has also run with mainstream fare, from the chick flick ''In Her Shoes" to the biopic ''Walk the Line." Schamus says a friend saw it at a screening of ''Rent" and reported that the audience applauded. Lee saw the trailer at a recent Calgary Flames game, not far from where the filming took place; the hockey crowd, he said, was ''very quiet."

But Schamus hopes the themes of rich romance and impossible love will drive women to the theaters -- perhaps dragging husbands and boyfriends along.

''What was the last great epic sweeping romance?" he asks, and a few minutes later, he settles on an answer. ''The Bridges of Madison County," he announces, is ''actually one of the few films that lines up."

If it were truly a traditional love story, of course, ''Brokeback Mountain" wouldn't have the hype, or the history. The screenplay famously languished in Hollywood for eight years, as stories spread about directors latching on, stars loving the script, and managers steering their clients away.

''Agents didn't want their beloved actors to take this risky role," McMurtry says. ''That's the bottom line."

Schamus, a longtime collaborator with Lee, said he figured the themes would appeal to the director's sensibilities. And after ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and ''The Hulk," Lee says, he was eager to do something quiet and small. Despite its rich landscapes and explosive subject, ''Brokeback Mountain" is an intimate film, with few characters, sparse dialogue, and a focus on interior emotions.

That's what attracted Ledger to the role of Ennis Del Mar, the taciturn ranch hand whose struggle to balance love and social obligation is at the movie's core.

''I never personally felt like I had a career at risk," Ledger says. ''If anything, it felt like an opportunity for me to mature as a person and as an actor, which is what I'd kind of been looking for."

And of shooting sex scenes with costar Jake Gyllenhaal -- the most striking one, violent and unflinching, was filmed in one morning, in 13 takes -- Ledger is almost perfunctory.

''I hate to break it to you, but it really wasn't [difficult]," Ledger says. ''Once you do the first take, you're kind of over it."

The movie's stars have been struggling, of late, to tread the line between downplaying the movie's gay themes and exploiting them. Controversy makes for good press, after all; ''courageous" isn't a terrible label during awards season. And some fans have anticipated the film as a cultural milestone.

''It's sweet to be walking down the street with Heath and have people come up and just say, 'Thank you,' " says Michelle Williams, who plays Ennis's wife -- and gave birth to Ledger's daughter this fall.

Indeed, as much as he touts the film's mainstream appeal, Schamus also raves about an Internet response that has centered on a very particular crowd. The movie's website posts confessionals from fans, some of whom admit to secret love affairs with same-sex soul mates. Internet buzz has marked the film as a triumph for gay rights.

''I think people can learn just as much about the struggle that gay men have watching this movie as they could watching a movie about AIDS or Stonewall," says Andy Towle, a cultural critic whose website, www.towleroad.com, gets 20,000 mostly-gay visitors each day. The site devoted so much space to ''Brokeback Mountain" that producers invited Towle to a special screening last fall. He has been gushing ever since.

Critics have been largely effusive, too, touting the film as ''classic" and ''groundbreaking." But it's unclear how much of that praise is reaction to what the film has come to represent, says Brandon Gray, president and publisher of boxofficemojo.com, an online movie publication and box office tracking service.

"It's like a badge of honor, for this movie, for straight critics to show how hip and cool and not homophobic they are," Gray says.

But mass audiences don't live in a film-festival bubble, Gray says. And some reportedly have chuckled at the trailer -- not because they're homophobic, he suggests, but because it seems maudlin and manipulative. To those untouched by political goals or movie industry chatter, he says, the gay theme may feel like tokenism, rather than truth.

''It doesn't come off as a profound thing," he says. ''It comes off as, 'Let's try to do an unrequited love story, but with gay cowboys.' That's why it causes giggles. That's why it will have a limited mainstream audience."

In a sense, the risks to the filmmakers are small. ''Brokeback Mountain" was made on a modest budget -- Focus Features officially says it cost well under $20 million, compared to $150 million for the epic ''The Chronicles of Narnia" -- and doesn't need great audiences to succeed.

Still Schamus and Lee have higher goals, and some precedent for thinking that a film could lead to change. Some 13 years ago, they collaborated on ''The Wedding Banquet," a Taiwanese comedy about a gay New York couple that plans a sham wedding to please one man's conservative parents. The day after it premiered in Taipei, Schamus says, the local gay and lesbian organization listed its phone number for the first time.

And the movie, Lee says, helped to spark a shift in what filmmakers are willing to do, and what audiences are willing to accept.

In Taiwan, Lee quips, ''only gay movies get made these days."