Denerstein: 'Brokeback' breaks through to mass appeal

Published January 7, 2006 at midnight

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Director Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain - the story of two gay ranch hands beautifully played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal - seems to be on its way to crossover heaven, boasting surprising commercial success and gaining increasing recognition as a pop-cultural phenomenon.

Consider:

• Over the important Christmas weekend, Brokeback's per-screen average of $13,599 topped that of King Kong ($9,305 per screen).

• In its first 10 days, the Focus Features' release earned $2.5 million in 69 locations throughout the nation, according to Box Office Mojo, a Web site that tracks sales. Mojo described the movie's $36,354-per-site performance as "potent."

• As of Jan. 2, the movie's domestic take had topped $15 million.

Landmark Theatres, which opened the movie in Denver on two screens at the Mayan and expanded it to two more at the Chez Artiste, reports success with the film across the country. Landmark doesn't disclose grosses for individual theaters, but Ray Price, the company's head of marketing, says that the movie is doing business at a Fahrenheit 9/11 pace.

"If you try to categorize this as a gay movie, then it's the Star Wars of gay movies," says Price.

Dollars aside, Brokeback seems to have set off national buzz alarms. A recent Sunday edition of The New York Times carried no less than three Brokeback stories in different parts of the paper.

Larry David, the comic genius behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, weighed in on the movie in yet another edition of the Times: "I'm for gay marriage, gay divorce, gay this and gay that," he wrote in part. "I just don't want to watch two straight men, alone on the prairie, fall in love and kiss and hug and hold hands and whatnot."

Author David Leavitt took a different tack. In a perceptive article in the online magazine Slate, Leavitt described Brokeback as a kind of "paean to masculinity," a movie that had evaded "the stale clichés of gay cinema."

But wait . . . there's more:

During an end-of-year panel on Fox News, commentator Juan Williams, who has worked for NPR and The Washington Post, predicted that Brokeback would "sweep" this year's Oscars, thus setting off some "conservative alarms."

Could be: The movie already has earned seven Golden Globe nominations, including one for best picture, and discussions about the movie aren't likely to abate as Focus continues to release the movie across the country.

Landmark's Price seems to think the phenomenon may defy attempts at explanation.

"It's a total Cinderella story because it's still gay cowboys," says Price. "Try that at a pitch meeting. Try predicting to anyone (before the movie's release) that it would sweep all the nominations. One of the reasons the movie's surprising everyone is that they put it in a box, and it doesn't belong there. It just doesn't belong in a box with any of the other toys."

To which I say, "Not entirely." It might be more accurate to say that Brokeback has one foot outside the box. And it could be that the foot that remains inside best accounts for the movie's success. The film tells an interesting story well, but its traction with mainstream audiences may result from the fact that the movie does as much to reflect prevailing American mythology as challenge it.

The movie represents an amazing balancing act; it may be about homosexual characters, but it's also shot through with a rugged and familiar romanticism that draws strength from strongly expressed individualism. The sorrow of Brokeback is palpable, but it's steeped in a gritty Western spirit that knows how to tough things out.

As Ennis Del Mar, the character played by Ledger, says at one point, "If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it."

There's not a big-screen cowboy from John Wayne to Clint Eastwood who couldn't have made that line work. Gay or straight, cowboys don't whine. They suffer in silence.

The Taiwanese-born Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Sense and Sensibility) is widely recognized as one of our finest and most versatile filmmakers. So it's hardly surprising that he makes us care about Ennis and his lover, Jack Twist: Lee refuses to treat these men as iconic gay figures. They're flesh-and-blood characters struggling to get along in a hardscrabble world. Each marries. Each tries to fit into the life he believes he should be living.

Equally important, Brokeback only indirectly criticizes the society that contributes to our heroes' discontents: Ennis and Jack don't dream of finding a gay-friendly environment. Twist, the more adventurous of the two, has gay relationships apart from Ennis, but he really dreams of a secluded life with Ennis on a ranch, a vision of isolation and retreat that's far from any Gay Pride parades.

To further ease potential audience anxieties, the sex scenes are tame, at least by the more explicit standards of the gay movies that play the nation's art houses. (If you doubt this, drop in on Garcon Stupide, a French movie currently at the Esquire.) Lee leaves no doubt that Jack and Ennis are lovers, but he's not using their sexuality in ways that audiences might interpret as "defiant."

Because Lee's impulses are artistic rather than propagandistic, the movie's themes have been broadened to include ruminations on the contemporary West and the devastations that result from clinging to romantic illusions.

First, the West: Taking its cue from the Annie Proulx short story on which it's based, Brokeback (with credit due to screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana) is imbued with an important understanding: The West is both burdened and buoyed by its mythology. Ennis and Jack not only long for one another; they yearn for their time on Brokeback Mountain, where they had the space to be free.

Let's face it: Ennis and Jack wouldn't totally fit into the society that was developing around them even if they were straight. Their attitudes and modes of expression - and even their physical postures - suit Western landscapes. They certainly don't suffer from any macho deficits. It may not seem like it at first, but on reflection, Ennis and Jack fit into the romanticized outcast mode that's also a part of Western lore.

If all this weren't enough, the film ties its emotional life to a universal theme, the inability to recapture moments of lost romance. Time, life and the ways of the world have a way of eroding and finally destroying purity and innocence, a process that's hardly defined by sexual preference.

So are we in new territory? Have mainstream audiences shown a sudden tolerance for gay characters? It has happened before. La Cage Aux Folles (1978) was considered something of a landmark, but it was defined by a giddy, silly spirit that threatened no one. Philadelphia (1993) had Tom Hanks and a certifiable aura of class, but it arrived with more fanfare than Brokeback and was regarded by some as more of a disease-of-the-week movie than a gay movie.

It's too early to tell whether Brokeback signals a cultural shift or just a middlebrow ratification of more avant-garde cultural rumblings. Will the movie help topple walls of resistance and aid those who want to see gay marriage legalized? And what happens if Brokeback, as some commentators have predicted, wins the Oscar for best picture?

Safe to say we're in a stay-tuned moment in popular culture, and the weird thing is that I'm not sure Ennis and Jack would approve - which is precisely why they're so intriguing. Rather than standing for resolution, they embody contradiction and inner conflict.

Ennis and Jack are as stuck with their notions of how the world works as anyone else. Don't think so? Ask yourself this: Why didn't one of these guys propose moving to a big city where they could have found like-minded people or, at minimum, some blessed anonymity? Even back in 1963, there were buses out of Wyoming.

I'm being facetious, of course, because anyone who has seen Brokeback knows Jack and Ennis are inseparable from the rural West. Ennis, in particular, would be no more comfortable in a city than he is in his own agonized skin.

"You know I ain't queer," says Ennis after they spend a night together on Brokeback Mountain, where they've been hired to tend sheep.

"Me neither," says Jack.

Nope. Somehow, you can't see either Ennis or Jack landing jobs on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. And that's also part of why Brokeback has been able to find an audience: Some may see the movie as a cop-out, a kind of semi-gay movie; others may view it as a useful way to broaden an important discussion; and still others may greet it as a sure sign of societal collapse.

But in playing by many of the same rules that bind its characters, Brokeback has proven difficult to ignore, and that remains a surprising and, dare we say, important development.

Denersteinb@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5424

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