Molly: Brokeback Mountain

Here's the post where I give my little review of Brokeback Mountain. We usually get pretty rushed with the whole seeing all five movies in one month thing, but I'd like to try this. Please, my four other oscar compatriots, please try and join me in this.

DISCLAIMER: I am home sick from work today, and am on sudafed. I would be sleeping, except that sudafed gives me the jitters. The jitters, I'm hoping will keep me up to write this post, however, sudafed also gives me the stupids, so we'll just have to see.

All four of us, Maureen, Francine, Peggy and I went to see Brokeback Mountain last Sunday. We all know this movie as the "gay cowboy movie." It was so much more than that. It's so beautifully shot and acted, the screenplay is economic in the best possible way. It so wondrously lays out the passions and tragedy of star-crossed love. What makes this so much more than a love story, however, it that the men's relationship far passed the short-term, all-consuming passion that Romeo and Juliet never lived to see beyond, into the realm of companionship, which left unrequited, creates so much of a greater and more gaping wound in a life: Loneliness, loss, and the horrible recognition that fear kept one from fulfilling ones life. God, it is so sad.

And so yes, it features cowboys and homosexuality. But that is not what it is about. I think Brokeback Mountain is about lying.

As a theme in film, we've seen "the lie" in movies a lot lately. See Catch Me If You Can, See Sideways. These two films take us on the roller-coaster that self-possessed compulsive lying can take you on, from Frank Abignale's jet setting highs and the thrill of the hunt, to Miles disdain at Jack's lying, when he himself is as big, if not bigger, of a phony (I will never get over the fact that he stole money from his mother!). These two films follow ultimately the same arc: Thrill ride set in motion by lies, the fact that lying can make you feel like a better person, and then: the downfall. Oh, and of course the denoument, wherein the guy gets the redeeming job, or the girl, or the 50-year-old bottle of wine in a paper cup at the In and Out Burger.

Brokeback Mountain never needs so predictable of a story arc. It's aim was not to thrill us, or even to redeem Jack and Ennis from their sullied state as "liars." Even their "good times," their fishing trips, are flavored with an underlying sadness. Jack asks Ennis, "Why can't it be like this all of the time?" Ennis's answer, that they have wives and children and jobs and neighbors who would mutilate them if they knew, shows us that their lives' lie is compelled not necessarily from within, but from without, from their culture. Their lie is keeping them from a fulfilled life. The tragedy in Brokeback Mountain is not some climatic downfall, but the fact that they have to lie at all.