Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that this is a mature, emotionally complicated film that is not appropriate for kids. The movie is focused on a lifelong relationship between two male cowboys. Their meeting and discovery of mutual desire at film's start is pictured in a rough-seeming sex scene (with fairly explicit activity); from then on, their physical relationship is less overt. They argue, wrestle, and occasionally come to sexual-tension-filled blows. Characters curse (including use of the f-word and homophobic slang), smoke, and drink hard liquor in a "manly" manner. Married couples also argue, as wives come to resent their husbands' "other" interests.
Families can discuss the film's treatment of Jack and Ennis' relationship. How do their lying and betrayal affect their wives and children? Also, families can talk about whether or not it was "brave" for Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger to take their roles.
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is a thoughtful, lyrical, eventually frustrating examination of two men's romance over many years. Though Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) never call themselves "gay" or "queer," they do love one another and share a sexual relationship.
They meet during a month of sheep ranching in Wyoming: alone on the movie's titular mountain, they share lust, passion, and genuine affection, though, as they are cowboys in 1963, they can't imagine their feelings defining themselves. Their silence lasts for years: each goes home, Ennis marries his girlfriend Alma (Michelle Williams), Jack longs for Ennis. They agree to meet again, four years later (an exchange of postcards includes Ennis' brief response to Jack's suggestion that they see each other again: "You bet") and then feel unable to stop. Still, they cannot articulate their feelings, only marvel at their own passion and tell their families they have gone "fishing."
The film is as much about silence and repression as it is about passion. Though Alma early on spots the men kissing, she doesn't tell Ennis, but only feels horrified and angry, silently watching him leave every few months and return with no trout in his tackle box. It's Alma's silence that makes Brokeback Mountain feel so serious. Her pain is neither exquisite nor elegiac. It is only hard. As soon as she sees the embrace, Alma is the tragic bearer of knowledge.
Ennis and Jack can't acknowledge their relationship as a choice and a commitment, only as a "thing." Though Jack wants them to move off to a ranch and live their fantasy daily ("There's never enough time"), Ennis is cautious, believing that, if their "thing grabs hold us at the wrong place and the wrong time, we're dead." Jack has seen it, as he recalls for Ennis in melancholy flashback to his nine-year-old self: his father brought him and his brother to see the corpse of a gay man killed by fearful straights.
Ennis' lack of language, initially seeming reduced in Ledger's performance to clench-jawed mumbling, is eventually subtler, especially in his relationship with his daughter, Alma Jr. (at 19, played by Kate Mara). They share a distrust of words that's common in Westerns (a genre this film concedes more than it emulates or challenges). Jr. observes her father closely, and does her best to keep him from taking up -- after his divorce from her mom -- with a perky barmaid. "You don't say much," notes the girlfriend as the two "girls" sit together at a table, watching Ennis lean over jukebox, "But you get your point across."
Brokeback Mountain gets its point across too: the men are anguished. They act on their pain in different ways, and the big wide Wyoming landscape -- so mighty, so simple, so overwhelming -- reflects their efforts to be together, to stay apart, to resist expectations and to succumb to them.
Families who like this movie might also like Titanic, a very different, though similarly epic, love story. You can also see previous Westerns that consider homosocial male "bonding," like Red River or Giant, or the unrequited love story in Gus Van Sant's courageous My Own Private Idaho.
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Sexual ContentGay cowboys' first encounter is rough and surprising to both; later trysts are more poetic, and mostly offscreen. |
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ViolenceSexual tension and homophobia lead to fights; a father describes for his son a terrible murder of a gay man; a scene near the end shows a character's beating death at the hands of brutal homophobes. |
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LanguageCowboy talk, including slang (derogatory for "homosexual", genitals, and sex acts) and cursing (f-word). |
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Social BehaviorCharacters struggle with homophobia (internalized and directed at them). |
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CommercialismTobacco and canned foods show labels. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoDrinking, cigarette rolling and smoking; a brief scene where characters smoke a joint. |
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