Brokeback Mountain

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
2005

Brokeback Mountain
Ang Lee
USA, 2005
English 130 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Focus Features/ River Road Entertainment
Executive Producer: William Pohlad, Larry McMurtry, Michael Costigan, Michael Hausman
Producer: Diana Ossana, James Schamus
Screenplay: Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx
Cinematographer: Rodrigo Prieto
Editor: Geraldine Peroni, Dylan Tichenor
Production Designer: Judy Becker
Sound: Drew Kunin
Music: Gustavo Santaolalla
Principal Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Anne Hathaway, Randy Quaid, Michelle Williams
Production: Focus Features

Destined to be recognized as one of the greatest love stories ever put to film, Brokeback Mountain represents a new and lofty level of achievement for acclaimed director Ang Lee, talented young actors Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal and a powerhouse trio of writers.

Brokeback Mountain is based on Annie Proulx’s much-lauded short story, originally published in The New Yorker in 1997 and adapted by acclaimed novelists Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. This literary pedigree gives the film a rare precision and economy of gesture that make its devastating emotional moments rich and resonant.

In 1963, two young, poor-as-dirt cowboys, Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger), are hired to tend cattle on top of Brokeback Mountain, Wyoming’s most picturesque grazing slope. Suspicious of one another at first, they become fast friends. Increasingly rebellious in their isolated universe, their friendship takes on a dangerous, revolutionary tone. Soon comes a frank and powerful sexual encounter that blossoms into a dreamlike, heart-pounding romance.

But the summer ends and their inevitable parting leaves them pained and yearning. Ennis marries his long-time sweetheart and settles down to a life of poverty and screaming kids in Wyoming, while Jack joins the rodeo and eventually makes his fortune with the burgeoning Sun Belt business of his Texan father-in-law. When Jack finally contacts Ennis, sending a postcard to say that he is coming through Wyoming for business, they embark on a painful lifelong relationship fraught with forbidden desire.

Brokeback Mountain can be read many ways: as a chronicle of shifting attitudes towards sexuality, as the representative moment when the Old West became the New West or even as a complex marriage between Douglas Sirk and Red River. But it is ultimately and fundamentally a film about love of the most evocative kind—impossible, lustful, all-consuming, passionate love, born in a place of overwhelming beauty at a time of great innocence and hope. I challenge anyone to remain unmoved as society’s mores and the inexorable vagaries of the world slowly undermine this love.
—Noah Cowan