Nothing spectacular happens to either in their daily lives.
The relationship continues all summer and might have ended there as they go their different ways, Jack to try his hand at rodeoing down in Texas, Ennis to continue cowboying in Wyoming and to marry his teenage sweetheart.īut four years later, Jack sends Ennis a card suggesting a reunion and they renew their close, loving relationship and continue to meet once or twice a year over the next couple of decades for visits into the wilderness to rediscover the epiphanic, transcendental rapture they found on Brokeback Mountain. It's presented neither romantically nor especially tenderly, and is followed the next morning by a neat piece of symbolism that involves both work and religion - Ennis discovering a dead sheep, the result of both his sin and his neglect. One night, after downing a deal of whiskey, they suddenly find expression for what they cannot articulate about their surroundings and the feelings they share, and they have sex. Though they ride horses, they're tending sheep, which, in eastern movie terms, is a slightly comic thing to do, less manly than herding cattle. But they've grown up in the school of hard knocks, Jack on his parents' impoverished ranch, Ennis as an orphan raised by an elder brother, and they love the sense of freedom they find in this beautiful, austere place. The weather is extreme, the food terrible, the pay poor. Their fine film centres on two excellent, complementary performances by Jack Gyllenhaal as the charming, outgoing Jack Twist, and Heath Ledger as the laconic, withdrawn Ennis del Mar, two cowboys aged around 20, who meet up in the summer of 1963 when they're hired to mind a large flock of sheep on the remote Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. After having been ill-served by the team that filmed The Shipping News, she has had the good fortune to have her tale somewhat expanded by Ang Lee, the versatile Taiwanese director, whose films include the delightful gay comedy, The Wedding Banquet, and the traditional western, Ride with the Devil, and have it co-scripted (with Diana Ossana) by Larry McMurtry, who has no current peer as a writer on the West and the way its present relates to its mythic past.
Annie Proulx's 1997 short story, Brokeback Mountain, took these themes and made the homosexual aspect explicit in a realistic modern setting that surprised and, in some cases, shocked readers of the New Yorker.
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