[ThisWeek] Brokeback Mountain at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

[thisweek at kenworthy.org]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...

Brokeback Mountain (R)
Friday & Saturday, May 5 & 6
7:00 PM
Sunday, May 7
4:00 & 7:00 PM
$5/adults
(see Review below)
* * *

Next week at the Kenworthy-

Neil Young: Heart of Gold (PG)
May 11-13, 7:00 PM
May 14, 4:30 & 7:00 PM
* * *

Also in May at the Kenworthy-

Match Point (R)
May 18 & 19, 7:00 PM
May 21, 4:10 & 7:00 PM

Rendezvous Talent Showcase
May 20, 7:00 PM
$10/general admission

Inside Man (R)
May 25-27, 7:00 PM
May 28, 4:05 & 7:00 PM

Coming in June: Boys of Baraka; Children¹s Matinee series: Dreamer; Cheaper
by the Dozen 2; Wallace & Gromit

Regular movie prices:  $5/adult, $2/child 12 or younger
KFS series pass prices:  $30/10 films, $75/30 films. KFS pass good only for
Sunday movies.

For more information on movies, events, rental rates, and/or to download a
schedule, visit our website at www.kenworthy.org
* * *
This week¹s review-

Brokeback Mountain

Directed by Ang Lee
Written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on the short story by
Annie Proulx
Rated R: Advisory: Sex scenes, adult subject matter, strong language and
nudity.
Running time: 2 hours, 14 minutes

As reviewed by Peter Travers writing for Rolling Stone Magazine

Ang Lee's unmissable and unforgettable Brokeback Mountain hits you like a
shot in the heart. It's a landmark film and a triumph for Heath Ledger and
Jake Gyllenhaal, who bring deep reserves of feeling to this defiantly erotic
love story about two Wyoming ranch hands and the external and internal
forces that drive them from desire to denial.

Directed with piercing intelligence and delicacy by Lee, the film of Annie
Proulx's 1997 short story turned into the unerring script by Larry McMurtry
and Diana Ossana is a model of literary adaptation that wears its emotions
on its sleeve.

That leaves the film vulnerable. The media keep tagging it as the gay cowboy
movie, the queer Gone With the Wind, the Western that puts the poke in
cowpoke. Coupled with the rise of homophobia as church and state shout down
gay marriage, the film is up against it.

Do me a favor: See the movie first and make your judgments later. It's an
eye-opener. The story begins in 1963, when ranch boss Joe Aguirre (Randy
Quaid) hires Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) to herd
sheep up on Wyoming's Brokeback Mountain. Ennis is quiet, but whiskey and
Jack's talk about his rodeo riding loosens Ennis' tongue and his
inhibitions. One cold night they share a bedroll. Jack gives the impression
of experience. For Ennis, this is nothing he'd done before, but no
instructional manual is needed.

Proulx writes it this way: "They never talked about sex, let it happen, at
first only in the tent at night, then in full daylight with the hot sun
striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and
snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word except once Ennis
said, 'I'm not no queer,' and Jack jumped in with 'Me neither.' "

Lee and the gifted cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros) transform
Proulx's terse prose into expansive visual poetry. Shooting in Alberta,
Canada, Lee avoids trite postcard prettiness to find the beauty and terror
in nature that mirror the vivid and sometimes violent relationship between
the two men. "It's nobody's business but ours," Jack tells Ennis.

He's wrong, of course. Joe spots them with his binoculars and never hires
them again. Ennis marries Alma (Michelle Williams) and has two daughters.
Jack moves to Texas, marries Lureen (Anne Hathaway) and has a son. Living a
lie is easier than dealing with the truth, at least it is for Ennis until
Jack pays a visit -- his first in four years.

Lee's filmmaking mastery has never been more evident. Watch the skill with
which the Taiwanese director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Sense and
Sensibility walks the volatile ground of this reunion scene. Ennis can't
contain his excitement. Running down the steps to greet his friend, he
collides with Jack's body, kissing him fiercely and Jack returning the heat.
Alma sees it too, from the window, finding reinforcement for something she's
always felt. Without dialogue, Lee creates a whole world that can be read
eloquently and movingly on the faces of the actors.

And what actors. Though the characters must age twenty years, Lee has cast
the film young, a risk that pays major dividends. Hathaway (The Princess
Diaries) excels at showing Lureen's journey from cutie-pie to hard case. And
Williams (Dawson's Creek) is a revelation, using what Proulx calls Alma's
"misery voice" when her husband goes fishing several times a year with Jack.
Who can blame her? They never bring home any fish. When Alma remarries and
lets Ennis feel the knife of her resentment, Williams lets it rip.

Of course, the movie would not work at all if the two lead actors didn't
deliver the goods. Gyllenhaal finds the reckless core in Jack, who cruises
alleys and bars in Mexico when Ennis rejects his offer to settle down and
run his father's ranch. Ennis lives in fear of coming out -- he relates a
harrowing childhood incident in which he saw a man tortured and killed for
the crime of living with another man. And so he forbids himself happiness
with the one person he has ever truly loved.

Ledger's magnificent performance is an acting miracle. He seems to tear it
from his insides. Ledger doesn't just know how Ennis moves, speaks and
listens; he knows how he breathes. To see him inhale the scent of a shirt
hanging in Jack's closet is to take measure of the pain of love lost. As
Jack told him once, "That ol' Brokeback got us good." That's the key reason
-- besides its daring, its bravery, its dead-on relevance to right now --
that this classic in the making ranks high on the list of the year's best
movies. It gets you good.


As reviewed by Peter Bradshaw writing for The Guardian (London)

Here is a love story from director Ang Lee in which the taboo word "love" is
never spoken. In fact the whole movie is a rich, spacious, passionate way of
showing, not telling, feelings that dare not speak their name - and doing so
with superb intelligence and magnificent candour. Brokeback Mountain is an
adaptation of a piece of writing from 1997 by Annie Proulx that already
bears the burdensome reputation of being the best short story ever to be
published in the New Yorker magazine: the tale of two itinerant ranch-hands
in the early 1960s, Ennis and Jack, who get a summer's work shepherding on
Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. They are played here by Heath Ledger and Jake
Gyllenhaal.

Thrown together, lonely and frustrated, Ennis and Jack find that their
relationship has grown deeper and fiercer than friendship and they have sex.
It is a glorious, revelatory experience, and safe from society's disapproval
on that remote Arcadian spot they are at one with their own natures and with
nature itself. And for the rest of their lives, unhappily married with
children, meeting every few years as notional buddies for furtive "fishing
trips", they yearn to recapture that brief shining moment of happiness and
truth.

Beautifully composed and wonderfully acted, this film is massively superior
to the last Proulx adaptation - the woeful Shipping News - and far better
than Ang Lee's last cowboy movie, his very moderate civil war drama Ride
With the Devil. Most literary adaptations are crushed, concertina-ed affairs
in which a novel's various chapters, scenes and characters are squeezed out.
A short story is different, and this movie gives you the feeling of wings
being spread, not clipped. There is a real sense here that the dimensions
and space of the film have been stretched, and screenwriters Larry McMurtry
and Diana Ossana have developed and extrapolated the source material with
flair, in particular giving a dramatic presence to the women in Ennis and
Jack's story. The wives are destined to be baffled and hurt, and crucially
realise that it is they, and not their menfolk, who are expected to live out
their lives in a state of denial.

If anyone is the seducer it is Jack, played by Gyllenhaal, whose performance
- along with his presence in Sam Mendes's forthcoming Gulf war movie Jarhead
- shows that he has matured into one of the most charismatic actors of his
generation. Jack is a rodeo rider, a guy who lopes and mopes around fairs
most of his professional life in exchange for a few seconds of thrashing
ecstatically on the back of a bucking steer before being painfully and all
too quickly thrown off. The sexual metaphor is not, however, laboured, and
Jack's attempts to draw out the laconic, strong-and-silent Ennis are not
predatory but open-hearted and good-natured. Ennis himself is a humble
ranch-hand by trade, only doing the job so that he can make enough cash to
marry his sweetheart Alma (Michelle Williams) and, as he fiercely tells
Jack, he "ain't no queer". After their first sex, Ennis grimly heads off to
his sheep, getting into a habit of making work an alibi for non-commitment
that will last him for the rest of his life.

The release of this film has already been accompanied by a debate about how
new and groundbreaking it is, and whether or not there has always been a gay
subtext to cowboy movies. I would be a millionaire if I had 50p for every
time someone mentioned Montgomery Clift and John Ireland admiring each
other's pistols in Howard Hawks's 1948 western Red River. Unfortunately,
this insight is often exaggerated to tease those reactionary homophobes who
often claim exclusive custody of the western, and leaves unanswered the
question of how or whether hints of homoeroticism are more authentic than
overt stories of heterosexual friendship. The conventions of cowboy life and
the bunkhouse were socially created circumstances in which gay identity
could be invisible, but Brokeback Mountain is surely new in courageously
removing invisibility's cloak, in removing the sub- from the subtext, and
asking how gay men can exist without living a lie, a question that has not
disappeared in 2006.

It is a desperately sad story in many ways, a story of two wasted lives, but
a beautiful and moving story, too. Jake becomes a sellout, working for his
obnoxious father-in-law selling farm machinery, and Ennis turns into a
grumpy and taciturn old cowpoke - their true selves become more poignantly
inaccessible with each unsatisfactory holiday together. Further than this,
Brokeback Mountain is the story of how most of our lives, gay and straight,
are defined by one moment in which things go gloriously and naturally right,
when everything falls into place, but which is then infected by the bacilli
of wrongness. Ennis and Jack, flawed as they are, do their best to resist
the encroachment of that infection; they fight not just against bigotry, but
dullness and mediocrity. Their story is not tragic, but heroic


Film reviews researched and edited by Peter A. Haggart
* * *

Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
208-882-4127
Sign up for this weekly email on events and movies at the Kenworthy by
logging onto our website
http://www.kenworthy.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PAMELA PALMER, Volunteer
Mailto:ppalmer at moscow.com
Film and Events Committee
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

http://www.kenworthy.org
To speak with a KPAC staff member,
call (208) 882-4127
Mailto:kpac at moscow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/thisweek/attachments/20060504/0c3d5b23/attachment.htm