Any retrospective consideration of Brokeback Mountain – and for that matter most of what was written about it upon release – has to contend with the cultural moment of 2005, and how the film was both informed by it and changed it. Massachusetts had become the first state to issue same-sex marriage licenses a little over a year prior to its release, shortly after San Francisco briefly did the same. This prompted a swift rebuke elsewhere – that November, ballot measures banning it passed in all eleven states that asked voters to weigh in – and with the simultaneous election of George W. Bush, it was clear the glimmer of hope for full gay rights would have to wait. But as with all such things, there was no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Queer life had a new platform.
Unusually for Hollywood, Brokeback Mountain was not a reaction to this moment, but part of it. Screenwriter Diana Ossana started adapting the 1997 short story by Annie Proulx (Pulitzer Prize winner for The Shipping News) almost immediately upon its publication, alongside her writing partner Larry McMurtry. A number of queer directors – Gus Van Sant, Joel Schumacher, and Pedro Almodóvar at least – were courted for or independently pursued it, until, via his own frequent collaborator and then-chair of Focus Features James Schamus, Ang Lee got hold of it. From there, production began quickly, and in the summer of 2004, cameras were rolling in Canada on Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, and Anne Hathaway.
The film became a substantial, somewhat-unexpected success. It met the culture at its moment, a rare feat, and became an instant talking point for how successfully “gay” it was. Some felt the relative dearth of sex scenes meant it wasn’t nearly the leap forward others made it out to be. I certainly remember, coming back home for Christmas during my freshman year of college, assuring my friends from my Catholic high school that it was a “135-minute film, 133 of which are about men not having sex.” The entire discussion prompted queer critic Nathan Lee to write – in a passage I will never, to my dying day, forget, but which is only accessible online via quotes – “If I hear one more straight critic complain that Brokeback Mountain isn’t particularly gay, I’m gonna spit on my hand, lube up my cock, and fuck him in the butt.”
Revisiting the film, which I had not seen since the week of its Boston release, was an exercise in excavating the past, and a reflection on how few queer films have resonated so deeply into the culture ever since. It famously lost to Crash for Best Picture at the Oscars, though Ang Lee won Best Director. Moonlight is, to date, the only film with a gay lead to win the top prize since, and it only made a third of what Brokeback did at the box office. Brokeback’s resonance – it has also been adapted into a 2014 opera and a 2023 play – is highly unusual and entirely explicable. It gave straight audiences a familiar template in the western and a familiar time in the 1960s-1980s in which to situate themselves, and queer audiences an uncommonly-mainstream and unusually-earnest depiction of a love affair between two men at odds with themselves and thus one another.
Much has been written attempting to diagnose Ennis’s and Jack’s sexuality, and I will not add to that out of grave disinterest. It’s entirely dismissive to say “it’s about two souls who found each other, and gender doesn’t play into it” as it is convenient to say it’s a portrait of repression. The centralling moving element of Brokeback is that Ennis and Jake don’t really, truly, find one another. One could chalk that up to repression – hell, it’s impossible to imagine it doesn’t play a part – but it’s just as likely about the difficulty of ever truly finding another person, and how it is exponentially more difficult when there isn’t a bedrock in society in which to do so. Ennis and Jack don’t come to know one another much more by the end than they do at the beginning; they’ve barely come to know themselves. They move through life like many others, impulsively and reflexively and never quite syncing up with those who would make them happiest, only to take that dissatisfaction on the ones they’re left with. It remains a rarely-surpassed high-watermark for both Ledger and Gyllenhaal, who were both nominated (it remains Gyllenhaal’s only nod), and who each capture something in their characters and something in themselves as actors that seems a tad elusive. Their portraits are inconclusively-drawn, their characters’ interests and impulses outside of strict explication, and as performers they’ve never quite been tasked to do or found a way to express elements of themselves they draw out here, a guarded vulnerability or a vulnerable shield barely keeping the world at bay. For Williams and Hathaway, too, it was a significant debut into the adult-prestige world from their teen trappings, an announcement that they were serious actors with whom we would all, quite shortly, be reckoning.
However you might be approaching this film, Kino’s new UHD release is the definitive way to do so. The transfer is really extraordinary, and even comparing it to the Blu-ray they released alongside it, a definite step up. Skin tones are warm and vibrant, and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s cool, even photography is granted a great deal of dynamic layers in the Dolby Vision grade. The distinctions really jump out in the night scenes, which often give the impression of being lit by campfire, the textures varying in a very textured, naturalistic way as the light flickers. The moody vistas, rarely free of a cloud – a constant reminder of the dour circumstances in which Ennis and Jack live – give plenty of opportunity for the transfer to shine, and it meets every challenge. Every blade of grass, every speck of dust is given life and light, and needless to say the basics like image stability and grain management are handled expertly and acutely, while compression artifacts are rare to nonexistent.
The supplements are mostly culled from prior releases – making-of docs (five altogether) – that look like they were premade for Good Morning America or Entertainment Tonight at the time of release. The best of them – “A Groundbreaking Success” – was made, I believe, for the initial Blu-ray release, and features several members of the cast and crew, as well as film critics like Matt Zoller Seitz and Alonso Duralde and generally-appreciate voices like Cameron Crowe reflecting on the film, its moment in time, and what might contribute to its longevity.
But the best supplement is the one Kino has added fresh, a commentary track with Julie Kirgo. She, alongside her late husband Nick Redman, ran the Twilight Time Blu-ray label, which brought to high definition release dozens of neglected melodramas, which makes her an ideal companion to one of the genre’s contemporary successes. She discusses the entire development and production of the film, but also offers the kind of personal appreciation and passion for the film that’s sometimes missing from such tracks. I’ve always loved the commentaries she and Redman did together and while I miss his presence for innumerable reasons, Kirgo is plenty sharp, organized, and engaged enough to lead the show.
Brokeback Mountain has more than cemented its place in the canon, and this release only further assures it. It remains a stunning, incisive film and Kino has done a great job bringing it to UHD and providing an exceptional commentary track to accompany it.Any retrospective consideration of Brokeback Mountain – and for that matter most of what was written about it upon release – has to contend with the cultural moment of 2005, and how the film was both informed by it and changed it. Massachusetts had become the first state to issue same-sex marriage licenses a little over a year prior to its release, shortly after San Francisco briefly did the same. This prompted a swift rebuke elsewhere – that November, ballot measures banning it passed in all eleven states that asked voters to weigh in – and with the simultaneous election of George W. Bush, it was clear the glimmer of hope for full gay rights would have to wait. But as with all such things, there was no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Queer life had a new platform.
Unusually for Hollywood, Brokeback Mountain was not a reaction to this moment, but part of it. Screenwriter Diana Ossana started adapting the 1997 short story by Annie Proulx (Pulitzer Prize winner for The Shipping News) almost immediately upon its publication, alongside her writing partner Larry McMurtry. A number of queer directors – Gus Van Sant, Joel Schumacher, and Pedro Almodóvar at least – were courted for or independently pursued it, until, via his own frequent collaborator and then-chair of Focus Features James Schamus, Ang Lee got hold of it. From there, production began quickly, and in the summer of 2004, cameras were rolling in Canada on Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, and Anne Hathaway.
The film became a substantial, somewhat-unexpected success. It met the culture at its moment, a rare feat, and became an instant talking point for how successfully “gay” it was. Some felt the relative dearth of sex scenes meant it wasn’t nearly the leap forward others made it out to be. I certainly remember, coming back home for Christmas during my freshman year of college, assuring my friends from my Catholic high school that it was a “135-minute film, 133 of which are about men not having sex.” The entire discussion prompted queer critic Nathan Lee to write – in a passage I will never, to my dying day, forget, but which is only accessible online via quotes – “If I hear one more straight critic complain that Brokeback Mountain isn’t particularly gay, I’m gonna spit on my hand, lube up my cock, and fuck him in the butt.”
Revisiting the film, which I had not seen since the week of its Boston release, was an exercise in excavating the past, and a reflection on how few queer films have resonated so deeply into the culture ever since. It famously lost to Crash for Best Picture at the Oscars, though Ang Lee won Best Director. Moonlight is, to date, the only film with a gay lead to win the top prize since, and it only made a third of what Brokeback did at the box office. Brokeback’s resonance – it has also been adapted into a 2014 opera and a 2023 play – is highly unusual and entirely explicable. It gave straight audiences a familiar template in the western and a familiar time in the 1960s-1980s in which to situate themselves, and queer audiences an uncommonly-mainstream and unusually-earnest depiction of a love affair between two men at odds with themselves and thus one another.
Much has been written attempting to diagnose Ennis’s and Jack’s sexuality, and I will not add to that out of grave disinterest. It’s entirely dismissive to say “it’s about two souls who found each other, and gender doesn’t play into it” as it is convenient to say it’s a portrait of repression. The centralling moving element of Brokeback is that Ennis and Jake don’t really, truly, find one another. One could chalk that up to repression – hell, it’s impossible to imagine it doesn’t play a part – but it’s just as likely about the difficulty of ever truly finding another person, and how it is exponentially more difficult when there isn’t a bedrock in society in which to do so. Ennis and Jack don’t come to know one another much more by the end than they do at the beginning; they’ve barely come to know themselves. They move through life like many others, impulsively and reflexively and never quite syncing up with those who would make them happiest, only to take that dissatisfaction on the ones they’re left with. It remains a rarely-surpassed high-watermark for both Ledger and Gyllenhaal, who were both nominated (it remains Gyllenhaal’s only nod), and who each capture something in their characters and something in themselves as actors that seems a tad elusive. Their portraits are inconclusively-drawn, their characters’ interests and impulses outside of strict explication, and as performers they’ve never quite been tasked to do or found a way to express elements of themselves they draw out here, a guarded vulnerability or a vulnerable shield barely keeping the world at bay. For Williams and Hathaway, too, it was a significant debut into the adult-prestige world from their teen trappings, an announcement that they were serious actors with whom we would all, quite shortly, be reckoning.
However you might be approaching this film, Kino’s new UHD release is the definitive way to do so. The transfer is really extraordinary, and even comparing it to the Blu-ray they released alongside it, a definite step up. Skin tones are warm and vibrant, and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s cool, even photography is granted a great deal of dynamic layers in the Dolby Vision grade. The distinctions really jump out in the night scenes, which often give the impression of being lit by campfire, the textures varying in a very textured, naturalistic way as the light flickers. The moody vistas, rarely free of a cloud – a constant reminder of the dour circumstances in which Ennis and Jack live – give plenty of opportunity for the transfer to shine, and it meets every challenge. Every blade of grass, every speck of dust is given life and light, and needless to say the basics like image stability and grain management are handled expertly and acutely, while compression artifacts are rare to nonexistent.
The supplements are mostly culled from prior releases – making-of docs (five altogether) – that look like they were premade for Good Morning America or Entertainment Tonight at the time of release. The best of them – “A Groundbreaking Success” – was made, I believe, for the initial Blu-ray release, and features several members of the cast and crew, as well as film critics like Matt Zoller Seitz and Alonso Duralde and generally-appreciate voices like Cameron Crowe reflecting on the film, its moment in time, and what might contribute to its longevity.
But the best supplement is the one Kino has added fresh, a commentary track with Julie Kirgo. She, alongside her late husband Nick Redman, ran the Twilight Time Blu-ray label, which brought to high definition release dozens of neglected melodramas, which makes her an ideal companion to one of the genre’s contemporary successes. She discusses the entire development and production of the film, but also offers the kind of personal appreciation and passion for the film that’s sometimes missing from such tracks. I’ve always loved the commentaries she and Redman did together and while I miss his presence for innumerable reasons, Kirgo is plenty sharp, organized, and engaged enough to lead the show.
Brokeback Mountain has more than cemented its place in the canon, and this release only further assures it. It remains a stunning, incisive film and Kino has done a great job bringing it to UHD and providing an exceptional commentary track to accompany it.
