Brokeback Mountain
I've found movie reviews are not to be read prior to viewing a film, but after, especially after you've had time to seriously reflect on what you've seen. Then, and only then, should you read someone else's opinion, but you must be open-minded to the author's analysis. I always allow for the fact that the reviewer noticed something (many things, usually) which I did not. In that context, reading a movie review can be as emotional an artistic experience as seeing the film itself. Reading this review made me feel like I was seeing Brokeback Mountain for a second time. And I think the thesis of the piece is exactly correct, that the movie is, and should be viewed as, a movie uniquely about the Closet. A sample:
The climax of these visual contrasts is also the emotional climax of the film, which takes place in two consecutive scenes, both of which prominently feature closets—literal closets. In the first, a grief-stricken Ennis, now in his late thirties, visits Jack's childhood home, where in the tiny closet of Jack's almost bare room he discovers two shirts—his and Jack's, the clothes they'd worn during their summer on Brokeback Mountain—one of which Jack has sentimentally encased in the other. (At the end of that summer, Ennis had thought he'd lost the shirt; only now do we realize that Jack had stolen it for this purpose.) The image —which is taken directly from Proulx's story—of the two shirts hidden in the closet, preserved in an embrace which the men who wore them could never fully enjoy, stands as the poignant visual symbol of the story's tragedy. Made aware too late of how greatly he was loved, of the extent of his loss, Ennis stands in the tiny windowless space, caressing the shirts and weeping wordlessly. In the scene that follows, another misplaced piece of clothing leads to a similar scene of tragic realization. Now middle-aged and living alone in a battered, sparsely furnished trailer (a setting with which Proulx's story begins, the tale itself unfolding as a long flashback), Ennis receives a visit from his grown daughter, who announces that she's engaged to be married. "Does he love you?" the blighted father protectively demands, as if realizing too late that this is all that matters. After the girl leaves, Ennis realizes she's left her sweater behind, and when he opens his little closet door to store it there, we see that he's hung the two shirts from their first summer, one still wearing the other, on the inside of the closet door, below a tattered postcard of Brokeback Mountain. Just as we see this, the camera pulls back to allow us a slightly wider view, which reveals a little window next to the closet, a rectangular frame that affords a glimpse of a field of yellow flowers and the mountains and sky. The juxtaposition of the two spaces—the cramped and airless closet, the window with its unlimited vistas beyond—efficiently but wrenchingly suggests the man's tragedy: the life he has lived, the life that might have been. His eyes filling with tears, Ennis looks at his closet and says, "Jack, I swear..."; but he never completes his sentence, as he never completed his life.I've been saying for a while now that the emotional and physical scarring inflicted on gay men in most of the world over many centuries due to religion and ignorance amounts to nothing less than a holocaust. Entire generations of gay men, past and present, and the friends and lovers who love them, will never know what life could have been like with unconditional support and a mentality free from the constant managing of a "straight" persona. And Heath Ledger lives in my neighborhood and not yours (unless you live in Cobble Hill), so there.
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