Brokeback Mountain is a 2005 American romantic drama film that depicts the complex romantic and sexual relationship between two men in the American West from 1963 to 1983.Proulx, Annie; McMurtry, Larry; Ossana, Diana (2005, 2006). Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay. London, New York, Toronto and Sydney: Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-00-723430-1

The film was directed by Taiwanese director Ang Lee from a screenplay by Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, which they adapted from the short story "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx. The film stars Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, and Michelle Williams.

Brokeback Mountain won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and was honored with Best Picture and Best Director accolades from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Golden Globe Awards, Producers Guild of America, Critics Choice Awards, and Independent Spirit Awards among many other organizations and festivals. Brokeback Mountain had the most nominations (eight) for the 78th Academy Awards, where it won three: Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score. The film was widely considered to be a front runner for the Academy Award for Best Picture, but lost to Crash.

At the end of its theatrical run, Brokeback Mountain ranked eighth among the highest-grossing romantic dramas of all time.

Plot

Brokeback Mountain is the story of ranch hand Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), two young men who meet and fall in love on the fictional Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming in 1963. The film documents their relationship over the next twenty years.

Ennis and Jack first meet when they are hired by Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid) to herd his sheep through the summer. After a night of heavy drinking, Jack makes a sexual pass at Ennis, who initially rejects, then allows Jack's advances. Although he warns Jack it was only a one-time incident, they develop a physical and emotional relationship. Shortly after learning their summer together is being cut short unexpectedly, they briefly fight, during which each is bloodied.

After the two part ways, Ennis marries his long-time fiancée Alma Beers (Michelle Williams) and fathers two children. Jack returns the next summer, but Aguirre, who witnessed Jack and Ennis on the mountain, does not hire him. Jack eventually meets, marries and starts a family with rodeo princess Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway). After four years, Jack visits Ennis. Upon meeting, the two kiss passionately, which Alma accidentally oversees. Jack broaches the subject of creating a life together on a small ranch, but Ennis, haunted by a painful childhood memory of the torture and murder of a man suspected of homosexual behaviour in his hometown, refuses. He also is unwilling to abandon his family. Ennis and Jack continue their relationship, meeting for infrequent fishing trips.

The marriages of both men deteriorate. Alma and Ennis eventually divorce. Ennis continues to see his family regularly until Alma, finally revealing her knowledge of the nature of his relationship with Jack, has a violent argument with him. Meanwhile, Lureen has abandoned her rodeo days and become a businesswoman with her father and expects Jack to work in sales. Hearing about Ennis's divorce, Jack drives to Wyoming in hopes they can live together, but Ennis refuses to move away from his children. Jack finds solace with male prostitutes in Mexico. Meanwhile, Ennis meets and later has a brief romantic relationship with a waitress, Cassie Cartwright (Linda Cardellini). Jack and Lureen meet and befriend another couple, Randall and Lashawn Malone; Randall gives the impression to Jack that he is open to homosexuality.

At the end of a fishing trip, Ennis attempts to push back their next meeting. An argument erupts over Jack's frustration at seeing Ennis so infrequently and Ennis blames Jack for being the cause of his own conflicted emotions. Jack attempts to hold him and there is a brief struggle, but they end up locked in an embrace. A flashback of Ennis saying goodbye to Jack during their summer on Brokeback Mountain fades back to Jack watching Ennis drive away.

An unspecified amount of time later, a postcard Ennis sends to Jack is returned stamped "Deceased." In a telephone conversation, Lureen tells Ennis that Jack died while changing a tire that exploded, while images of Jack being beaten to death by three men flash on the screen. Lureen tells Ennis that Jack wished to have his ashes scattered on Brokeback Mountain, but that she doesn't know where it is. Ennis travels to see Jack's mother and father (Roberta Maxwell and Peter McRobbie), where he offers to take Jack's ashes - but the father refuses the request, preferring to inter him in a family plot. Jack's mother asks Ennis if he would like to see Jack's childhood bedroom before he leaves. There he discovers on a hanger in the closet the old bloodstained shirt he thought he had lost on Brokeback Mountain, learning instead that Jack had kept it hanging with the bloodstained shirt Jack himself had worn in that fight. Ennis holds them up to his face, breathes in their scent, and silently weeps. He carries the shirts downstairs with him, and Jack's mother allows him to keep them.

In the final scene, 19-year-old Alma Jr. (Kate Mara) arrives at her father's trailer with the news that she is engaged. She asks Ennis for his blessing and invites him to the wedding. Ennis asks her if her fiancé really loves her, and she says "yes." After Alma's departure, Ennis goes to his closet. Inside, hanging on a nail pounded into the door, are the two shirts with a postcard of Brokeback Mountain tacked above. Now, Jack's shirt is tucked inside of Ennis's. Ennis carefully fastens the top button of Jack's shirt, and with tears in his eyes mutters, "Jack, I swear..." while slowly straightening the postcard, before closing the door and walking away.

Cast

* Heath Ledger as Ennis del Mar

* Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist

* Randy Quaid as Joe Aguirre

* Michelle Williams as Alma Beers

* Anne Hathaway as Lureen Newsome

* Linda Cardellini as Cassie

* Anna Faris as Lashawn Malone

* David Harbour as Randall Malone

* Roberta Maxwell as Mrs. Twist

* Peter McRobbie as John Twist

* Kate Mara as Alma del Mar Jr.

Production notes

While the movie is set in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, it was filmed almost entirely in the Canadian Rockies in southern Alberta.

The "Brokeback Mountain" in the movie is so named because the mountain has the same swayback curve as a brokeback horse or mule, which is swaybacked or sagging in the spine, is actually a composite of Mount Lougheed south of the town of Canmore to Fortress and Moose Mountain in Kananaskis Country.

The campsites were filmed at Goat Creek, Upper Kananaskis Lake, Elbow Falls and Canyon Creek, also in Alberta. Other movie scenes were also filmed in Cowley, Fort Macleod, and Calgary.

The movie was filmed during the summer of 2004.

Mark Wahlberg declined the starring role, saying he turned down the opportunity because he was "a little creeped out" by the homosexual themes and sex scene.http

Commercial success

Brokeback Mountain cost about U.S.$14 million to produce, excluding its reported advertising budget of $5 million. According to interviews with the filmmakers, Focus Features was able to recoup its production costs early on by selling overseas rights to the film.

The film saw limited release in the United States on December 9, 2005 (in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), taking $547,425 in five theaters its first weekend.

Over the Christmas weekend, it posted the highest per-theater gross of any movie and was considered a box office success not only in urban centers such as New York City and Los Angeles, but also in suburban theaters near Portland, Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, and Atlanta. On January 6, 2006, the movie expanded into 483 theaters, and on January 13, 2006, Focus Features, the movie's distributor, opened Brokeback in nearly 700 North American cinemas as part of its ongoing expansion strategy for the movie. On January 20, the film opened in 1,194 theaters in North America; it opened in 1,652 theaters on January 27 and in 2,089 theaters on February 3, its widest release.

Brokeback Mountains theatrical run lasted for 133 days and grossed $83,043,761 in North America and $95,000,000 abroad, adding up to a worldwide gross of more than $178 million. It is the top-grossing release of Focus Features, ranks fifth among the highest-grossing westerns (since 1979) and eighth among the highest-grossing romantic dramas (1980-Present).

The film was released in London, UK, on December 30, 2005, in only one cinema, and was widely released in UK on January 6, 2006. On January 11, Time Out London magazine reported that Brokeback was the number one movie in the city, a position it held for three weeks.

The movie was released in France on January 18, 2006, in 155 cinemas (expanding into 258 cinemas in the second week and into 290 in the third week). In its first week of release, Brokeback Mountain was in third place at the French box office, with 277,000 people viewing the movie, or an average of 1,787 people by cinema per week, the highest such figure for any film in France that week. One month later, it reached more than one million viewers (more than 1,250,000 on March 18), with still 168 cinemas (in the 10th week). Released in Italy on January 20, the film grossed more than 890,000 euros in only three days, and was the fourth highest-grossing film in the country in its first week of release.

Brokeback Mountain was released in Australia on January 26, 2006, where it landed in fourth place at the box office and earned an average per-screen gross three times higher than its nearest competitor during its first weekend despite being released in only 48 cinemas nationwide. Most of the Australian critics praised the film. Brokeback was released in many other countries during the first three months of 2006. The film was released in Peru and in the Netherlands on February 16, and opened in Germany on March 9. It premiered in Brazil on February 3 and quickly topped the charts with more than 100,000 viewers. The movie was released in India on March 10.

During its first week of release, Brokeback was in first place in Hong Kong's box office, with more than US$473,868 ($22,565 per cinema).

Brokeback Mountain was the highest-grossing movie in the U.S. from January 17 through January 19, 2006, perhaps due primarily to its wins at the Golden Globes on January 16. Indeed, the movie was one of the top five highest-grossing films in the U.S. every day from January 17 until January 28, including over the weekend (when more people go to the movies and big-budget films usually crowd out independent films from the top-grossing list) of January 20-22. On January 28, the movie fell out of the top five and into sixth place at the box office during that weekend before entering the top five again on January 30 and remaining there until February 10.

The movie was released on January 20, 2006, in Taiwan, where director Ang Lee was born. It ran until April 20.

The pair of shirts from the film sold on eBay on February 20, 2006, for US$101,100.51 The buyer, film historian and collector Tom Gregory, called the shirts "the ruby slippers of our time," and intends never to separate them. The proceeds will benefit California children's charity Variety, which has long been associated with the movie industry.

Reception

Professional film critics have heaped praise on Brokeback Mountain.

. Retrieved on May 27, 2006. The film won four Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture-Drama, and was nominated for seven, leading all other films in the 2005 awards. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, as well as the title Best Picture from the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association, the Florida Film Critics Circle, the Las Vegas Film Critics Society, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the Utah Film Critics Society, and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (the BAFTAs).

Brokeback Mountain received an 87 percent "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, compiled from 223 reviews, with the consensus that "a beautifully epic Western, Brokeback Mountain's gay love story is embued with heartbreaking universality, helped by the moving performances of Ledger and Gyllenhaal." The film was given a "two thumbs up" rating by Ebert and Roeper, the former granting a four-star review in the Chicago Sun-Times. The film received positive reviews from Christianity Today. Conservative radio host Michael Medved gave the film three and a half stars, stating that while the movie's "agenda" is blatant, it is an artistic work.

The film's significance has been attributed to its portrayal of a same-sex relationship without any reference to the history of the gay civil rights movement. (Link dead as of February 4, 2007) This emphasizes the tragic love story aspect, which leads many commentators to effectively compare Ennis and Jack's drama to classic and modern romances like Romeo and Juliet or Titanic, often using the term star-crossed lovers. This link to classic romances is no coincidence: the poster for the film was inspired by that of James Cameron's Titanic, after Ang Lee's collaborator James Schamus looked at the posters of "the 50 most romantic movies ever made".

There was also disagreement among reviewers, critics, and even the cast and crew as to whether or not the two protagonists of the film were actually gay, bisexual, heterosexual, or under no sexual label at all. Most often the film was referred to in the media as the "gay cowboy movie," but a number of reviewers wrote that Jack and Ennis were bisexual.