Ang Lee's Wyoming-set romance. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal across twenty years. The Best Picture nominee that almost won.
Wyoming, 1963. Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two young ranch hands, are hired to spend the summer tending sheep on Brokeback Mountain. The work is solitary and the men slowly form a sexual and emotional relationship that neither expected. At summer's end they separate. Ennis marries Alma; Jack marries Lureen and moves to Texas to work for her father's farming-equipment company.
The film tracks the two men across roughly twenty years. They meet periodically for 'fishing trips' that allow them to spend a few days together. Their marriages slowly deteriorate. Alma divorces Ennis; Lureen and Jack drift apart. Jack dies — possibly from an accident, possibly murdered by men who suspected his orientation. The film closes with Ennis visiting Jack's parents in Wyoming, finding Jack's old shirt and his own from the original summer tucked together in Jack's closet, and carrying both shirts back to his own trailer.
Brokeback Mountain was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won three (Best Director for Ang Lee, Best Adapted Screenplay for Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, Best Original Score for Gustavo Santaolalla). It did not win Best Picture; that prize went to Crash. The result is, by general critical consensus, one of the most-debated Best Picture losses in modern Academy history.
The cultural footprint Brokeback Mountain produced exceeds what Best Picture winners typically achieve. The film's title became cultural shorthand for any number of gay-themed cultural references; the phrase 'I wish I knew how to quit you' entered general English vocabulary; Lee's specific framing of the same-sex romance as serious dramatic material has shaped almost every subsequent mainstream-cinema treatment of gay relationships. The film is, in some sense, the structural precursor to the broader cultural shift on LGBTQ representation across the 2000s and 2010s.
Heath Ledger's Ennis del Mar is, by general critical consensus, the work of his career. The performance is built almost entirely on physical comportment and verbal restraint. Ennis speaks rarely; when he does, the words come through clenched teeth and a deep-throat register that Ledger constructed specifically for the role. The character's interior life is communicated through what the audience can see he is suppressing rather than what he expresses.
Ledger was nominated for Best Actor at the 2006 Oscars; he lost to Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote. The performance preceded his more-famous work in The Dark Knight (2008) by three years. Ledger's death in January 2008, before The Dark Knight's release, gave Brokeback Mountain a posthumous weight it would not otherwise have had. The 2009 Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Dark Knight was, in some sense, the Academy's late recognition of work that should have been awarded for Brokeback Mountain three years earlier.
Brokeback Mountain is adapted from Annie Proulx's 1997 short story of the same name, originally published in The New Yorker. The story is roughly 11,000 words long; the film expands it into 134 minutes. The expansion is, by general critical consensus, one of the most-successful short-story-to-feature adaptations in modern cinema. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana's screenplay preserves Proulx's specific verbal register (the Wyoming-ranch idiom, the long silences, the suppressed emotional content) while extending the dramatic timeline to encompass twenty years of the two men's lives.
Proulx has, in subsequent interviews, expressed mixed feelings about the adaptation. She has praised the film while also describing the cultural footprint as exhausting — fans who have approached her with their own readings of the story have, by her account, often projected interpretations onto her work that she did not intend. The tension between the source and the adaptation is one of the recurring topics in literary-adaptation discussion.