Film Forum

U.S., 2005
Directed by Ang Lee
With Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams
Screenplay by Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana
WINNER Academy Awards® – Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, 2006
Approx. 134 min. 35mm.

“A love story that starts in 1963 and never ends… a cowboy stands against a wall in Signal, Wyoming, his hat tipped down as if he were falling asleep. Another fellow, barely more than a kid, turns up in a coughing old truck and joins the waiting game; both are in search of a job. There is something wired and wary in their silence, and the entire passage can be read not only as an echo of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, whose opening hummed with a similar suspense, but also as an unimaginable change of tune. Sergio Leone’s men were waiting for a train; these boys are falling in love. At last, we learn their names: Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). Both are hired for the summer, to tend the flocks on Brokeback Mountain, and that is where we follow them for the first, idyllic act of their story. One evening, a drunken Ennis shares Jack’s tent, and, in the heat of a cold night, there is a breathy, wordless unbuckling of belts… BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, which began as an Annie Proulx story, comes fully alive as the chance for happiness dies. Its beauty wells from its sorrow, because the love between Ennis and Jack is most credible not in the making but in the thwarting…” – Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

Presented with support from the Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

Reviews

“A deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart.”
– Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times