By Dave White
MSNBC contributor
Dec. 6, 2005
1. Accept the fact that this is all your fault in the first place
You were the one who was all excited to take your ladyfriend to “Jarhead” anyway and when you got there and saw that it consisted of lot of AJ (how this article will refer to Adorable Jake from here on) running around all sweaty, muscular and shirtless in the desert, doing a sexy dance wearing nothing but a Santa Claus cap over his “area” and then simulating a big gay orgy with his fellow grunts, you were like, “When does the killing start in this movie?” while your woman thought, “Oh yes, more Santa Dancing please.” You brought it on yourself.
2. Realize now that you have to shut up
You kind of have no idea how important it is for you to shut up. But it’s crucial. I was recently at a press screening for another movie and I overheard four guys in the theater lobby talking about “Brokeback.” They were resolute in their refusal to go see it and they couldn’t stop loudly one-upping each other about how they had no interest, were not “curious,” and were, in the words of the loudest guy in the group, “straight as that wall over there.” Oh, the wall with poster for the Big Gay Cowboy Movie on it? That straight wall? Well here’s something that everyone else now knows but that guy: he’s probably gay. Being silent marks you as too cool to care about how other men see you. It means you’re comfortable and not freaked by your own naked shadow. Did Steve McQueen go around squawking about how straight-as-a-wall he was? No, he didn’t. He was too busy being stoic and manly.
3. The good news — there’s less than one minute of making out
It’s about 130 minutes long and 129 of them are about Men Not Having Sex. So yes, maybe it will be the longest almost-60 seconds of your life, but there it is. Less than one minute. In fact, it’s 129 minutes of really intense longing and sadness and unabashedly weepy, doomed love story. In a very real way that’s a lot more porny than any of the man-on-man canoodling that made it past the editing room. But if you’re going to be a big sissy about it then you can go get her that Diet Coke and jumbo popcorn during the first major sex scene. And no plugging your ears and singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” either. All singing is inherently gay, is why. Plus you’ll be in a movie theater and some big bruiser gay guy might kick your butt. Then you’ll feel even more emasculated.
4. Remember that it’s a western
And the script was adapted by none other than Total Dude Larry McMurtry. That guy is the coolest western writer in the country. He wrote “Lonesome Dove.” You love “Lonesome Dove.” In fact, the only problem with remembering that it’s a western is having to ignore the fact that most westerns are about 1000 percent gay. If you think I’m making that up, just go watch “Red River” again.
5. They’re tortured and you get to feel sorry for them
Just like in that Tom Hanks movie, these gay guys get kicked around a lot. It’s set in the 1960s and the characters played by Heath and AJ don’t even know they’re gay. They think they’re just regular straight guys who suddenly find themselves all turned on by each other and, honestly, don’t even really understand why they’re awash in yucky, hypnotic love feelings. Actually wait… you know what? Don’t think about that too much. Better if you just forget about the “why” of it all and start rooting for these underdogs. Pretend they’re like Sean Astin in “Rudy.”
6. Anne Hathaway, who plays AJ’s wife, gets topless. The End
I think it’s fair to report this and here’s why: as a gay man, the only reason I even agreed to sit through the really stupid remake of “The Longest Yard” was because one of my friends told me you get to see the wrestler Goldberg in the shower. In one scene. That’s it. I sat through the whole thing for one scene. In that respect, my hetero pals, we are all brothers deep inside — it’s just a different brand of naked flesh that ignites our prurience.
7. And finally, it’s just your turn
Really, it is, and you know it. Imagine how many thousands of hetero love stories gay people sit through in their lives. So you kind of owe us. Now get out there and watch those cowboys make out.
(excerpts from Entertainment Weekly)
...Ang Lee's adaptation of Annie Proulx's award-winning New Yorker short story, which traces the ardor and anguish of two cowboys (played by Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) who are sent to wrangle sheep on a Wyoming mountainside in 1963 and end up wrangling each other. The story unfolds over two decades, during which they endure loveless marriages to long-suffering wives and bide their time between perilous trysts.
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What makes it so potentially groundbreaking, though, is that it has become something of a cinematic oxymoron: an unapologetically sexual love story between two men with a real shot at breaking out of art houses and into the mainstream. ...Brokeback defies the familiar stereotypes of what it means to be gay on screen (no one has AIDS or an affinity for interior decorating) and doesn't cheat when it comes to the love scenes.
Not so long ago, it would have been considered career suicide for a major male movie star to get hot and heavy with a man on screen. And in this climate of cultural conservatism, when elections can hinge on the demonization of gay marriage, Brokeback represents a huge gamble for everyone involved. Nobody has more on the line than Ledger and Gyllenhaal, who risk alienating a huge portion of their core fan base - young men.
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Gyllenhaal first became aware of Brokeback when Gus Van Sant was attached to direct, but he wanted nothing to do with it. ''I was like, No way!'' says Gyllenhaal, splayed out on his hotel room couch, having just flown into L.A. for Jarhead's opening weekend. ''At 18 years old, it's not something you want to be involved in. Five years later I read the script knowing Ang was directing and I just had to do it.''
Gyllenhaal was coming off The Day After Tomorrow and had just
established his box office bankability. Surprisingly, he approached the
risks involved with jeopardizing his mainstream mojo almost like an
adrenaline junkie looking for a danger fix. ''It's not like it didn't
go through my mind that people were going to have big problems with
it,'' he says.
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The melancholy on set was amplified for Gyllenhaal by his sadness over the end of his relationship with his longtime girlfriend Kirsten Dunst. ''It was hard. I was going through a breakup, and I had to live with that in the mountains for three months,'' says Gyllenhaal. ''I had nobody. And watching the two of them (co-stars, Heath Ledger & Michelle Williams who play husband & wife) fall in love in this loneliness...''
On-the-job romance is always tricky, and Ledger and Williams didn't exactly keep a low profile, risking the envy of the rest of the lonelyhearts on set. From the very first day of shooting — when Ledger doted on Williams after she injured her knee in a sledding scene — they were the official set couple, a haven of blissful domesticity, sharing a trailer and cooking meals for the cast and crew. They zealously guarded their off-camera relationship from the persistent sorrow they portrayed on screen.
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The sex scenes were an emotional gauntlet for both actors. This was terra incognita in Hollywood moviemaking. Two young, male mainstream movie stars had never engaged in such ravenous make-out sessions or such graphically choreographed sex. The Brokeback script called for all that in addition to the biggest acting challenge: genuine intimacy and raw emotion. Both actors tried to hide their day-of jitters with varying degrees of success. ''I was super uncomfortable, but I was the one who shouldn't have been,'' recalls Gyllenhaal, explaining that his character is the more sexually experienced of the two. ''What made me most courageous was that I realized I had to try to let go of that stereotype I had in my mind, that bit of homophobia, and try for a second to be vulnerable and sensitive. It was f---in' hard, man. I succeeded only for milliseconds.''
And then Lee made them repeat the sex scene 13 times. ''For me it was a little easier than it was for Jake,'' Ledger says, nervously pulling his red cap inside out and back again between his hands. ''Any kind of nerves I had about approaching that scene, I didn't have to hide. We were like, 'F--- it, we took on this story and there's no point in shying away from it.' Neither of us wanted to do it again any time soon. But in the end, it was just like kissing a person.''
''Heath and I made love,'' Gyllenhaal says, with an impish grin, ''and they got a baby out of it.''**
-''I believe everybody has a flip side: the cowboy with the homo, the tough guy with the sensitive,'' he says. ''Love is more complicated than our culture categorizes it. Everybody is a universe.'' - Ang Lee
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''Brokeback Mountain is that pure place you take someone that's free of judgment. These guys were scared. What they feared was not each other but what was outside of each other. What was so sad was that it didn't have to happen like that,'' he says. ''I mean, people's minds have been changed. That's amazing.'' - Jake Gyllenhaal
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(excerpts from EW review)
Brokeback Mountain is that rare thing, a big Hollywood weeper with a beautiful ache at its center. It's a modern-age Western that turns into a quietly revolutionary love story. In 1963, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), a couple of dirt-poor ranch hands, take a job guarding a flock of sheep on Brokeback Mountain, a pristine jutting vista nestled in the lush Wyoming wilderness.
To keep the coyotes away, Jack is assigned to sleep near the flock, but mostly the two men have hours, days, and weeks on their hands. They jump on horses to guide the sheep across meadows and rivers; they sit around a campfire, heating canned beans and swapping stories and a bottle of whiskey. Then, one night, when it's too cold for either one of them to sleep outside, they do something that the old movie cowboys never did: They wrap their bodies in a rough embrace and, without a hint of seduction, they have sex, an act that's as shocking to them as it is to us.
Because it feels right, they do it again as the days go by. Yet what is it, exactly, they're feeling, this urgent seizure of loneliness and affection and desire? Ennis and Jack, who've been raised in a world where to be ''queer'' is not to be a man (and is therefore unthinkable), can't grasp the feeling that's come over them because they literally don't have the words for it. In their very innocence, they are, in an odd way, a bit like the ancient Greeks, who saw homosexuality as an exalted expression of male friendship. Ennis and Jack call each other ''friend,'' and they mean it, but their bond evolves into a delicate, suspended romance, and Brokeback Mountain becomes their Eden, the craggy cowboy paradise from which they are destined to fall.
Adapted from Annie Proulx's brilliant 1997 short story, Brokeback Mountain was directed by Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) from a script by the venerable Western novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) and Diana Ossana, and together they have coaxed Proulx's anecdotal, through-the-years narrative into a wistful epic of longing and loss. Lee stages the picture with an enraptured tranquillity that lets each emotion shine through. At times, it's a bit too tranquil, especially in the episodic second half, but when Brokeback Mountain takes off, it soars.
Ennis and Jack drift into their separate lives, each caught in a fractured marriage with children, but they reunite over the years, going on fishing trips where no fishing gets done, sharing, however fleetingly, the connection they can barely speak of. They're products — victims — of a closeted culture, yet secrecy and repression work on them in a special way. They're men who have fallen in love without quite realizing that's what's happened to them, and the glory of Brokeback Mountain is that in tracing their fates, treating their passion as something unprecedented — a force so powerful it can scarcely be named — the movie makes love seem as ineffable as it really is.
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Williams & Ledger in Brokeback Mountain
Williams, Ledger & baby
Brooklyn
mid-November