Brokeback Mountain (Movie)
December 9, 2005
Brokeback Mountain is based on a short story written by Annie Proulx.
Director: Ang Lee
Producers: Diana Ossana and James Schamus
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Ang Lee
Ang Lee OBS is a Taiwanese-born film director, screenwriter and producer. He was born on
October 23, 1954.
Lee's earlier films, such as The Wedding Banquet, Pushing Hands, and Eat Drink Man
Woman explored the relationships and conflicts between tradition and modernity, Eastern
and Western. Lee also deals with repressed, hidden emotions in many of his films, including
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Ice Storm; Hulk; and Brokeback Mountain. Lee's work
is known for its emotional charge, which critics believe is responsible for his success in
offsetting cultural barriers and achieving international recognition.
Lee has won the Academy Award for Best Director twice, for Brokeback Mountain (2005)
and Life of Pi (2012), and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). He is also the only director to win both the Golden Bear twice,
for The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Sense and Sensibility (1995), and the Golden Lion
twice, for Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Lust, Caution (2007). Lee is the only non-
Caucasian director to have won an Oscar, Golden Horse, Golden Globe, and BAFTA.
CHARACTERS
Ennis Del Mar
A rough-mannered, paycheck-to-paycheck ranch worker. Although he falls in love with Jack
Twist during their summer on Brokeback Mountain, he marries Alma Beers and has two
daughters. Ennis is a stoic who, mired in the life he has made for himself, allows himself only
stolen glimpses of the happy life he and Jack could have had with each other if
circumstances had been different.
Ennis is a man of few words, whose actions often speak for him. When Ennis meets Jack,
he is saddled with responsibility, engaged to Alma, and at the mercy of a conservative
Wyoming culture that has no place for a gay ranch hand. Yet Ennis has nowhere else to go
and no other profession at which to try his hand. An orphaned high school dropout
dependent on hardship funds and raised to be pragmatic, he is trapped in a life over which
he has little control. Rather than run off with Jack and try to build a happy life, as Jack
repeatedly suggests, Ennis considers the reality of it all: the violent opposition that would
greet two gay ranchers living together, his marriage to Alma, his love for his daughters. The
life he builds, which involves financial hardship and eventually child support, effectively
prohibits him from escaping.
Ennis is a prisoner of the life he has been born into. Without the financial wherewithal to
escape, without any sort of community support for his sexual proclivities, and imbued with
the belief that one must bear whatever one can’t fix, Ennis is fated to live out the rest of his
life as a man who tasted happiness once but has never again reached that peak. Though it
is Jack Twist who, we infer, is murdered by those who oppose his sexual orientation, it is
Ennis Del Mar—living in his trailer, confined to a sad life on the broad, flat plains of Wyoming
—who is the story’s tragic soul.
, Jack Twist
A passionate, emotional ranch worker. Jack has little money, although he is obsessed with
the glitzy rodeo lifestyle. Though he is in love with Ennis, he marries Lureen and has a son.
On the side, however, Jack has affairs and travels to Mexico to have sex with male
prostitutes. He tries to coax Ennis into building a life together, but Ennis resists. Ultimately,
Jack dies in a freak roadside accident that is more likely a violent murder.
Jack Twist is the more verbally aggressive and outgoing of the story’s two main characters.
His name is onomatopoeic in its quick, light-footed sound, the clarity of its consonants
strikingly dissimilar to the marbles-in-mouth quality of “Ennis Del Mar.” Jack Twist is flashy
and brazen, a would-be rodeo star, and later a glitzy Texan transplant who sports a brass
belt buckle and large capped teeth. He is far less able and willing than Ennis to subjugate his
sexual impulses to the demands of conservative married life. The initial tryst on Brokeback is
Ennis’s first sexual encounter with a man; but of Jack we may suspect that he is somewhat
more experienced. And whereas Ennis muffles his sexual desire, Jack projects his desire for
Ennis onto other men and women.
Ennis and Jack are complementary: Ennis the taciturn loner, Jack the performer who needs
an audience; Ennis the hand-to-mouth earner, Jack the man who has married into money;
Ennis the stoic who grits his teeth and bears his life, Jack the proponent of change. Yet for
all his bravado and planning, Jack never seems to get what he wants. His father shrugs that
most of his son’s ideas “never come to pass,” and Jack himself says, “Nothin never come to
my hand the right way.” When he tells Ennis his plan for them to run a ranch together, it
doesn’t occur to him how detached from reality his fantasy truly is, how impossible or ill-
advised it would be to implement it. This divide between fantasy and reality drives the two
men apart over the years, and Jack ultimately pays a steep price for his dreams.
Alma Beers
Ennis’s long-suffering wife. For nine years, Alma tolerates Ennis’s lack of affection, frequent
trips with Jack, and poorly paying jobs. Although she sees Jack and Ennis kissing, she never
says a word about it until well after they are divorced. She finally confronts Ennis about Jack
during a Thanksgiving dinner, after which Ennis storms out and does not see her again.
Lureen
Jack Twist’s wife. Lureen has money from her father’s farm machinery business. She has a
head for numbers, and she and Jack enjoy a financially comfortable life together. When
Ennis calls her after Jack’s death, her tone is icy, implying that she knows all about Ennis as
well as Jack’s other male lovers.
Joe Aguirre
The foreman who hires Jack and Ennis to work as herder and camp tender, respectively, on
Brokeback Mountain in the summer of 1963. Aguirre spies on Jack and Ennis through his
binoculars and later suggests to Jack that he knew what was going on between them up on
Brokeback.
THEMES
The overwhelming natural forces of desire and love
Just as nature governs the ranch and mountain lifestyle, the natural force of desire directs
every significant action taken by Ennis and Jack in “Brokeback Mountain,” even when those
