DOCUMENT TOOLS

Printer Friendly

Add To Clipboard

IMAGES

Uncredited image

(See hardcopy for Photo Description) (FPinfomart: Restricted, Canada.com: Restricted)

About Images

The enduring masterpiece Ledger left behind
National Post
Friday, January 25, 2008
Page: A17
Section: Issues & Ideas
Byline: Jonathan Kay
Column: Jonathan Kay
Source: National Post

"I tell ya there… there were these two old guys ranched up together, down home. Earl and Rich. And they was the joke of town, even though they were pretty tough ol' birds. Anyway they … they found Earl dead in an irrigation ditch."

-- Ennis del Mar,

Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain, Heath Ledger's acting masterpiece, has been Youtubed, Family Guyed and Saturday Night Lived so many times, that it is sometimes difficult to recall what an astonishingly good film it was. Had Brokeback been the only film Ledger ever made, we would still properly be mourning the loss of one of the world's great actors.

Brokeback is too often pigeonholed as a gay love story. (Wikipedia describes it as "a romantic drama film that depicts the complex romantic and sexual relationship between two men in the American West from 1963 to 1983.") But the homosexuality in the movie was incidental to a larger theme: the random cruelty of the human condition, a condition that allows outside forces to destroy the lives of even the toughest men.

In the case of Ennis del Mar (Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), the force that destroyed them was in their genes: They were gay men living in a homophobic world. When they were true to their love, they lived in a tiny snow globe of ecstasy. But everywhere else, they were lonely souls living a lie.

Some of the most exquisite vignettes from the movie come when those two worlds collide. Years after seeing the movie, I still remember the brief scene when Jack shows up for seasonal work at Brokeback --hoping to see Ennis again--and is turned away in humiliating fashion by the rancher, who knew their secret. ("You guys wasn't gettin' paid to leave the dogs babysittin' the sheep while you stem the rose.")

Outwardly, these men are the very embodiment of western ruggedness -- especially Ennis, whose bar-fight brutality escalates in accordance with the shame he feels about his sexuality. But inside, they are train wrecks. And Ang Lee deserved the Best Director awards he got for letting that wreckage play out without any sort of deus ex machina or romantic Hollywood gloss.

The wreckage in the film is not really about gay love, or even love itself. It is about powerlessness. Fiddle with the plot, and it would be easy for artists of equal calibre to make essentially the same film about men who are addicted to alcohol, or drugs, or gambling, or are suffering crippling illness,

or who fall hopelessly in love with the wrong woman. When Jack famously says to Ennis " I wish I knew how to quit you," the you could be anything.

This is why so many people who aren't gay, and care nothing for Western vistas and cowboy flicks, were so affected by Brokeback. None of us have control of our lives. The movie is about whatever uncontrollable force we stay up at night worrying about. As in every great film, we read ourselves into it.

In my particular case, Brokeback became a film about fatherhood. Both Ennis and Jack marry and have kids. Jack manages to cobble together an outwardly respectable middle-class family life, even as his marriage deteriorates into a business relationship. But Ennis can't manage the act, and his life spirals into poverty and dysfunction as he throws everything away for the few chances he gets be with Jack.

In one scene -- the one that will leap into my mind every time I think of Ledger's acting career -- Ennis barges into the grocery store where his wife has taken a job to make ends meet. He's got the kids with him, and tells his wife she's got to mind them so he can go off on short notice. He shoves the bewildered kids at the woman and then takes off. Everything about his body language shows that he knows what he's doing is wrong. But he has no choice. This is what's become of his broken life.

It's a wrenching vignette that plays to every man's worst fears about his own abilities as a father. That's the scene that broke me. And it did so because Ledger was a brilliant enough actor to sell it.

The circumstances of Ledger's death this week are murky. We don't know yet whether he committed suicide with sleeping pills; or merely took too many of them, in the wrong combination, by accident. But the interviews he gave in late 2007 suggest a tormented man -- to the point he could barely sleep. I don't want to psychoanalyze an actor I don't know, or proffer facile analogies between his own life and that of his signature screen character. But when I heard the news of Ledger's death, my mind immediately reached to Ennis'

grim outlook on life. However successful or happy or tough a lot of us may be on the outside, there is always --always --a vulnerability within that threatens to drag us down into a ditch.

jkay@nationalpost.com

Illustration:
• Black & White Photo: / (See hardcopy for Photo Description)

Idnumber: 200801250158
Edition: National
Story Type: Column
Length: 838 words
Keywords: BUS ACCIDENTS; SCHOOL BUSES
Illustration Type: P

PRODUCTION FIELDS
NDATE: 20080125
NUPDATE: 20080125
DOB: 20080125
POSITION: 1