Starring: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway.
Director: Ang Lee
Rated: M
BROKEBACK Mountain is a tale of tragic, homosexual love, based on the 1997 story of the same name by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie E. Proulx.
Though Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code are telling exceptions, generally films have a greater popular impact than books.
That said, I am always amazed that the people who call for often unseen movies to be banned are not on record having called for the book upon which the film is based to suffer the same fate.
Can’t impressionable Australians read? Don’t books challenge accepted mores?
At the outset Catholic viewers should be warned that there are a couple of homosexual and heterosexual sex scenes in Brokeback Mountain which will be too confronting for them, and that the overall story of same-sex attraction would, clearly, not be to some people’s taste. But more on that in a moment.
In outstanding performances, a ranch hand, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and a rodeo rider, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) take on a few month’s work in Wyoming during the summer of 1963 as sheep herders on Brokeback Mountain.
In the mountains of Wyoming, here presented as an idyllic and wild environment, Jack and Ennis make camp and guard the herd as coyotes lurk in the hills and harsh weather threatens them in a landscape of copious natural beauty.
It is in this setting that the two men fall in love.
They are both strong, passionate men who have no illusions about the consequences that knowledge of their forbidden love could bring.
They live their public lives fully, having children and careers, and only see each other infrequently on “fishing trips” up to the mountain, maintaining their adulterous affair while their wives raise the children.
Ennis marries his childhood sweetheart and Jack meets a rodeo gal, the daughter of a wealthy businessman who made his fortune selling combine harvesters.
Ennis’s knowing and betrayed wife, Alma, is excellently portrayed by Michelle Williams and the Nashville style of Jack’s spouse is finely drawn by Anne Hathaway.
The Catechism is very clear about the official teaching of the Church in regards to homosexual acts.
They are “intrinsically disordered” and the inclination itself is “objectively disordered” (#2357).
In the next paragraph, however, the Church instructs us that gay women and men “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity” (#2358).
The Catechism never directly tackles the cause of same-sex attraction.
It does not tell us whether homosexuality is such because of nature or nurture.
The definitive answer to this question is yet to be established.
But this is precisely the ground on which Brokeback Mountain treads. Its promotional line is “Love is a Force of Nature”.
Appalled by the hate crimes against gay men in the Midwest, Annie Proulx wanted to juxtapose the seasons and contradictions of physical nature with the developments and contradictions within human (sexual) nature.
Ang Lee’s stunning direction makes this point handsomely.
The film argues that Ennis and Jack are latent homosexuals until they meet. Then their real sexual natures emerge.
Jack wants to make a lifelong commitment. Ennis cannot see any future in that. He argues that in God-fearing Wyoming, the wages of sin would be death.
So these gay cowboys end up having annual, adulterous meetings for 20 years. Deceit marks their lives, and they both pay a terrible price.
This film is highly political. It weighs into the debate about same-sex attraction arguing that it a given part of nature, and to deny one’s nature is to do violence.
This can be true, but the Church argues that whatever the origin of same-sex desire, celibacy is the only option.
This teaching is entirely consistent with the demanding discipline called for in regard to heterosexual pre-marital and extra-martial desire, as well as in response to natural anger, greed and gluttony.
There are few issues on which some Christians get more worked up than homosexuality.
But, as many parish priests will tell you from years in the confessional, the people most wounded by some Christian commentator’s fundamentalist reading of certain biblical texts and their anything but sensitive public comments on the topic are very good Christian homosexuals and their families.
They are trying to live generous and faith-filled lives, and their struggle to do so needs to be acknowledged.
There is only fleeting evidence in the film that Ennis or Jake are Christian believers. Ennis gets married in a church.
As presented, they are not bound to follow the teaching of any Church.
But the challenges of this film to us are many.
How do we live with, and love, those who disagree with us by word and action?
Is there not a moral distinction to be made between a lifelong commitment to one partner, which Jake wants, over the promiscuous lifestyle he later adopts?
Are we prepared to listen to gay people’s stories, or would we prefer the personal violence that often comes from anyone’s secrets being hidden in the dark?
And in our advocacy for the teaching of the Church do we keep in mind the human beings behind the slogans, accepting them with “respect, compassion, and sensitivity”?
