News & Opinion

The film Brokeback Mountain may well be beautifully acted, powerfully directed and faithfully adapted from E. Annie Proulx’s novella. But the one thing it ain’t is “radical” or “ground-breaking” as it keeps being hailed. Yes, it has a unique subject — the love affair between two gay ranchhands — but in sketching their tortured relationship it couldn’t be more conventional.

In his excellent book The Celluloid Closet, the film critic Vito Russo related how gay characters inevitably wound up ridiculed, murdered or unhappy in movies. Only in recent years has that familiar storyline been partially redrawn.

Brokeback Mountain may shift gays centre stage, but their destinies couldn’t be more in keeping with Russo’s model. Yes, there’s a sex scene, but it’s brief. The men are happy for a millisecond. This is yet another movie about unhappy, tortured homosexuals.

OK, that’s how Proulx wrote it and I’m the last one to argue for “positive images”. But whereas her book exists on shelves groaning with every conceivable kind of queer character, Brokeback Mountain the movie exists in isolation, with no substantive mainstream gay movies around it. You never count the number of “straight” films. They’re just there; five new ones, featuring man-woman stuff, released every week. No doubt with this in mind, in order to get the masses into multiplexes Brokeback Mountain’s producers and stars have actually disowned its content: it’s a film about love, we are told. It doesn’t matter that it’s between two men.

Well, yes it does. If you want to sell the film to bigots, tell them the men wind up sad and lonely. They’ll like that.

Gays are excited not only because Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal wear jeans so snugly, but also because we are still pathetically grateful for any crumbs from Hollywood’s table. We’re used to so little else it feels like a banquet. The most daring thing about this movie is its nickname,“Bareback Mountain”, alluding to gay sex— notably absent in the movie. There’s too much whining and not enough shtupping.

Hollywood’s real achievement will be to make gay movies, or movies featuring gays, with every shade of homo vividly drawn. We’ll know we’ve gotten somewhere when, in the last reel, the man gets his man and they share a lusty, passionate embrace to show we do happy as well as tragedy.