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Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inboxNeed a news break? By contrast, he believes that Brokeback Mountain carved out a new niche as a "straightforward and serious" film that won "newfound respectability" for a romantic story involving same-sex lovers. He punches the wall, heaves with sobs, and lets out animal moans that are barely muffled by the Stetson pulled over his face.
A simple sentence, one that other prepubescent children might have forgotten. Turner notes that "the wave of mainstream queer moves in the 90s" tended to "toggle between Aids-related dramas like Philadelphia (1993) and And the Band Played On (1993), and lighter comedies like The Birdcage (1996) and In & Out (1997)".
Based on Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story of the same name, Brokeback has become a totemic feel-bad movie, sharing space with Stepmom and The Notebook in the movies-to-cry-to Hall of Fame.
How it was pioneering
"It's easy to take for granted the way that Brokeback Mountain, with its starry cast and A-list director, profoundly changed the shape of LGBTQ+ representation in the mainstream," argues Kyle Turner, author of The Queer Film Guide: 100 Films That Tell LGBTIA+ Stories.
"The theatres were packed, and in every theatre it was the same – after the tent scene, five or six people would get up to leave," she tells the BBC.
"Don't Ask Don't Tell," the ban on gays in the military, was repealed in 2010.
That story begins in rural Wyoming in 1963, when drifters Ennis and Jack are hired by a local rancher to herd sheep through grazing ground on the titular Brokeback Mountain. For me, it’s this final knife-twist that lifts the film above melodrama and grounds it in brutal reality: Even Douglas Sirk’s ultimate weepie, All That Heaven Allows, ends with a bereft Jane Wyman being offered some comfort by a wandering deer.
Brokeback has your heart in a half hitch knot from the jump, and it never untangles it throughout.
'In every theatre, people would leave': How 'gay cowboy movie' Brokeback Mountain challenged Hollywood – and the US
At the time, Brokeback Mountain looked like a surprising pivot from director Ang Lee, who had recently made the 2003 superhero film Hulk, though his other directing credits ranged from an acclaimed Jane Austen adaptation (1995's Sense and Sensibility) to a hugely successful martial arts film (2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).
As the morning sun rises in the sky, Ennis turns off the road and walks gingerly to a nearby alley, as if using his final reserves of energy before his legs give out. From their first flirtation, where Gyllenhaal’s Labubu eyes pierce from under a cowboy hat, there’s a delicate intimacy that unfurls as Jack and Ennis allow the shells they have constructed against the world to crack open for one too-short summer romance.
In a subtle yet utterly committed performance, Ledger deeply embodies the specific pain of closeted life, and how gay shame can stick to you despite two decades of trying to scrub it from your skin. It's implied a short time after that Jack is killed, perhaps in a hate crime – the very thing Ennis was always afraid of, after seeing the aftermath of such a murder when he was a child.
Does 'Brokeback Mountain' still resonate?
An initial thought that may percolate in a film nerd's head is that "Brokeback Mountain" lost the 2006 best picture Oscar to "Crash" – a decision that has left heads scratching to this day.
Ennis’s bottled-up feelings create a pressure cooker inside him that threatens to blow at any time, and that he can only express in physical fights with other men (and, in one disturbing scene, threatened violence toward his wife). Nonetheless, they carry on an affair for nearly two decades. But after the lights came up in the theater, I turned to my female friend, noticed that we were both puddles of snot and tears, and realized that maybe I was a romantic after all.
Photo: Kimberly French/Courtesy of Focus Features
Watching Brokeback Mountain again today, I understood that my memory had been clouded by those gags of the mid-aughts.
Yes.
But anything that could move the needle further toward LGBTQ+ acceptance is a film worth watching and discussing – especially one that also doesn't choose to put a sexuality label on its main characters, suggesting they aren't even necessary.
When I think of a modern day Jack and Ennis, I picture them eyeing each other across a crowded bar in the same cowboy hats and jeans.
In these bedrooms, under low lights and with blinds firmly drawn, Brokeback Mountain taught a generation of gay men how to yearn.
Focus Features’ new poster for the film is a wink to anyone who fell for Jack and Ennis’s romance the first time around, with a tagline reading “Love Will Bring You Back.” It’s a lure to have your heart broken all over again, that may as well come with a stack of tissues and a box of strawberry crèmes on the armrest.
But the LGBTQ+ community is still under threat, with legislation targeting the community ramping up the last few years.