Herding stereotypes to the last roundup

BY JAN STUART | STAFF WRITER

December 9, 2005

When Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger wrestle their way into the sack together for the first time in Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain," they are ripping away at much more than their dirt-caked jeans. With one tumultuous lovemaking scene - it's more like love-attacking, actually - the two intrepid young actors manage to bust up several mythologies at once.

The most obvious is the myth of the cowboy West, a land of manlier-than-thou men who release any pent-up longings with a quick stop at the local cathouse and a long drag on a Marlboro cigarette.

The second - belied by the dizzying workload in store for both stars - is that complex, sexually active gay characters (as opposed to the minstrel-show buffoons that mince through "The Producers") are a death knell for acting careers.

The third to go is the wearying mythology of hype, the radical expectations of sexual explicitness stirred up by the film's triumphal march through film festivals in Venice and Toronto.

On that score, we can all settle down a bit. If Lee stirs up the dust at all in his portrayal of two sheepherders in love, he does so through the most mainstream language available. Like many revolutionary acts of cinema, "Brokeback Mountain" disarms with weapons of mass instruction.

Eloquently adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from Annie Proulx's New Yorker short story, "Brokeback Mountain" jumps off in 1963, when ranch hands Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) sign on to herd sheep for a Montana rancher (Randy Quaid).

The two strangers are, conventionally speaking, made for each other. Jack is personable, playful, a talker. Ennis is stoic and repressed, parceling out the gift of speech mostly to express how tired he is of eating beans.

Their simmering mutual attraction overtakes them by surprise, in a violent coital burst. But it haunts them long after they have settled, hundreds of miles apart, into fitfully content married lives: Jack with a Texas businesswoman (Anne Hathaway) and Ennis with an adoring Montana house drudge (Michelle Williams).

The loping first hour of "Brokeback Mountain" seduces the viewer with big-sky panoramas and bucolic sheepherding tableaux. We share the protagonists' sense of being liberated amid this Western paradise and lulled by the possibility of true romance. But as the men attempt to re-create their youthful Eden on the sly over the ensuing years, those big Montana expanses begin to feel suffocatingly hemmed-in.

Ledger, secreting his lines from the sides of his mouth like a tongue-tied ventriloquist, most powerfully embodies the terror and entrapment felt by someone who lives his life in a state of emotional house-arrest.

He's so convincingly tight-lipped, indeed, that I had to ask three people after the screening if they could tell me what his final line was.

We are continually reminded that Ennis and Jack dwell in a time and culture where transgressive desire must be spoken of in code and where no illicit conduct goes unnoticed. "Brokeback Mountain" coaxes audiences to walk several hundred miles in its characters' shoes, luring us with the scent of forbidden fruit and rewarding us with the sumptuous taste of complex storytelling.