Welcome to They Got it Wrong, where I look at films that were either universally praised or dismissed by critics and argue that the critical consensus for said was wrong. This week, I look at a film many people felt should have won Best Picture in 2006, Brokeback Mountain.
I have to admit that I actively tried to avoid watching Brokeback Mountain for a long time, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter. When I saw trailers for the film, they did not resonate with me on an emotional level and the film looked downright dull to me. So I was shocked when I found out that nearly every critic out there was completely over the moon about it. The film looked like classic Oscar bait to me: an acclaimed director (Ang Lee), big stars taking on meaty roles (Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal), a period setting, and a buzzworthy and controversial love story, and critics and audiences responded in kind. The film grossed over 80 million dollars from a 14 million dollar budget and received eight Oscar nominations and winning three, including Best Director for Mr. Lee. I finally watched the film a few months ago for a film course I was taking, and I was disappointed to see that my initial suspicions about the film were correct.
That is not to say that there are not some fantastic things about the film. My favorite aspect of the film was the cinematography of Rodrigo Prieto, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work. There some absolutely gorgeous shots of the vast Wyoming landscape that give the film the epic scope it tries to embody in the narrative, but when the focus shifts from the natural world to the lives of the characters, the magic goes away almost completely. Yes, Heath Ledger has some great moments in the film, particularly the heartbreaking final scene, but too often, he is hamstrung by his grumbling speech patterns and while most people saw his character as someone who spoke that way because he had a grown up finding it difficult to express himself, I just found his voice gimmicky. It made Heath Ledger seem like he was “acting” instead of completely losing himself in a character as he did in The Dark Knight. Jake Gyllenhaal was even guiltier of this than Ledger. It felt as though he was playing a type instead of a character. He plays the obsessive, whiny wife to Ledger’s gruff, stone-faced husband, and playing these types removes any chance that the two can have real chemistry with one another like all great screen couples do. None of the other characters in the film, even those played by talented actresses like Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway, can rise above the restrictions of the type they have to play and infuse their characters with any life at all.
While the actors all underachieve, they are not done any favors by the story given to them. On the surface, the concept of forbidden love between two men who cross paths over the years at the possible expense of their normal lives is an intriguing one. However, the Academy-Award winning screenplay actually does the love story a disservice by making it completely unrealistic. I know that in some films characters can fall in love very quickly, but in this film, Ledger’s and Gyllenhaal’s characters, Ennis and Jack, start their intimate relationship very abruptly with minimal development. We do not really see the mutual attraction between these two people until they have already started getting busy in the tent, so when they inevitably drift apart at the end of the film, it feels unfortunate but not tragic.
The homosexuality was a complete non-issue for me because love is universal across all genders and orientations, so when a homosexual relationship is portrayed poorly on screen, it deserves to be pointed out the same way that a poorly conceived heterosexual relationship would be. While most critics probably legitimately enjoyed the film, I cannot help but think that some might have been afraid of a slap on the wrist from the PC police and went easy on the film because it was about a gay couple instead of a straight couple. Would Brokeback Mountain have gotten the same reception if the two lovers were a male and a female? We will never know, but I cannot help but feel that people would rate the film properly instead of praising it much more than it deserves.
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