Back in January, film critics Manuela Lazic and Adam Nayman began working together on a long list that initially had more than 100 titles on it, in order to sum up something interesting—if not definitive—about the past quarter century of film. Narrowing things down was hard. They spread out their picks as evenly as they could over this 25-year period and also across a variety of styles, and for the rest of 2025, they will be dissecting one movie per month. They’re not writing to convince each other or to have an ongoing Siskel-and-Ebert-style thumb war. Instead, they’re hoping to team up and explore a group of resonant movies. We’re also hoping that you’ll read—and watch—along.
Adam Nayman: “I haven’t seen it. I’ll be glad to talk about ranching, but I haven’t seen the movie.”
So said George W. Bush in January 2006 when a Kansas State University student asked the 43rd president—an avowed movie fan who famously suggested watching Meet the Parents with Tony Blair as a geopolitical bonding ritual—whether he’d checked out Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. Bush’s snarky demurral made headlines, both for the obvious implication that a commander in chief elected on a “compassionate conservative ticket” had no interest in engaging with a surprise box office smash being hailed in real time as a breakthrough in mainstream gay representation, and for the way it seemingly separated the film’s controversial subject matter from its rugged cowboy-state milieu. Such distinctions were crucial for a Yale graduate given to highly visible 10-gallon cosplay; God forbid anybody think that the most powerful man in the world could watch a sensitive, penetrating study of masculinity in crisis and see himself on-screen.
Even in a nascent social media moment, Brokeback Mountain was a lightning rod for critical discourse, with predictable saber rattling from right-wing talk radio types (“Humpback Mountain,” per the late and unlamented Rush Limbaugh) and some more than fair hand-wringing at the other end of the spectrum that a movie about the queer experience made by a straight director with a pair of heterosexual A-list leading men reeked of compromise. For the most part, though, Lee’s film was enough of an artistic success that it evaded the usual hysteria that followed movies about the gay experience. “What if they held a culture war and no one fired a shot?” wrote Frank Rich in The New York Times in December 2005. “‘Brokeback Mountain,’ a Hollywood product after all, is not leading a revolution but ratifying one, fleshing out—quite literally—what most Americans now believe.”
When I first saw Brokeback Mountain at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival, it was with a local audience primed to celebrate Lee and his stars as brave culture warriors. Watching it again, though, I was struck when I realized just how much the movie was—contra Dubya’s dubious comments—genuinely about ranching. The Western has always been a genre about the distance between wilderness and civilization, focused on the people who find themselves caught perilously in between. Lee, a shape-shifting filmmaker who’s always searching for entry points into both real and filmic history, plays purposefully with these archetypes. When they first meet in the one-horse town of Cowley in 1963, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are in need of not only work but also an escape hatch from the urban world. Jack is trying to get as far away as possible from his father, whom he describes, with obvious and painful tact, as impossible to please. Ennis, meanwhile, is on the run from nothing while also moving toward the same sort of void. What’s waiting for them up on Brokeback isn’t just a flock of sheep for tending—a religious metaphor in a film attuned to certain all-American pieties about sin and redemption—but also a chance to get back to the land before it disappears. As shot by Lee and his masterful cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, their new stomping grounds look like the most beautiful sort of blank canvas.
The Century in Cinema
Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story “Brokeback Mountain,” originally published in The New Yorker, is a spare, almost ghostly piece of writing; just over 10,000 words, it unravels an impossible and intractable love affair between two men in the throes of a profound and uncontrollable mutual attraction who then spend two decades in incompatible states of denial over their desires and what to do with them while raising families several states apart. “I’m not you,” Jack chides Ennis during one furtive rendezvous. “I can’t make it on a couple a high-altitude fucks once or twice a year. … I wish I knew how to quit you.”
Proulx’s prose is long on achingly quotable dialogue and short on physical descriptions of landscape; in shaping the material for the screen, Lee and screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana stayed faithful to the verbiage while inserting a surfeit of lyricism. Brokeback Mountain is a film of massive establishing shots and horizon lines; the question of whether its painterly approach was meant to make its contents more palatable to a mainstream audience is worth asking. But considering that the main thrust of the story has to do with Ennis and Jack experiencing their summer under the stars as a kind of secular Eden, the gorgeousness of the imagery serves a rhetorical function. There’s one shot early in the film, of Jack and Ennis each sitting in repose, separated by about 15 feet of hillside as sheep teem in the valley below, that somehow feels as if it’s inside both men even as it suggests a cosmic perspective. It’s the work of a masterful filmmaker.
Lee won his first Academy Award for Best Director for Brokeback Mountain, and we could probably have a lot of fun talking here about the fact that he ended up losing Best Picture to Paul Haggis’s Crash, a movie perceived at the time to have an even bigger liberal bleeding heart than Brokeback. There are, obviously, myriad differences between Brokeback Mountain and Crash, but the most important one is that where Haggis seemed to be proposing a group hug as a potential solution to America’s embedded racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, Lee was never prescriptive—he knew why we can’t all just get along. What’s so extraordinary about Ledger’s performance as Ennis—and with respect to Gyllenhaal, it’s Ledger’s movie—is how acutely he conveys the character’s inability to accept himself; his physical solidity belies a sense of a man pulling himself apart from the inside out. It’s not just Jack who wishes that he could quit Ennis; Ennis wishes he could quit himself, too. But the attachments he makes—not just to Jack but also to his wife, Alma (Michelle Williams), and their daughters—exert their own force. They pull him back to reality and responsibility, which he leverages as best he can.
It’s devastating to watch Ennis physically hand his bawling toddler to Alma before scuttling away on one of the out-of-town fishing trips he uses as a pretext for seeing and sleeping with Jack—not just because of how precisely the scene maps a certain kind of male presumptuousness and irresponsibility, but also because of the subtext, which is that Ennis, who wants to be with Jack, cannot also be a good and present father to his children. There’s a lot to say about the way Brokeback Mountain dramatizes marriage and, more generally, sex and love as a series of compartmentalizations and how attentive Lee is to the female characters and their points of view. Between Williams, Anne Hathaway (as Jack’s wife, Lureen), and various characters played wonderfully by Anna Faris, Linda Cardellini, and Kate Mara, the film has a wonderful distaff ensemble. Manuela, what do you think?
Manuela Lazic: Back at university, I took a class on “film authorship,” and Lee’s filmography was the catalyst through which we discussed the concept, as it had been understood from the Cahiers du Cinéma days up to 2015. (I cannot believe that was 10 years ago, but as this very series of articles makes clear, time does pass, inexorably, unforgivingly.) A Taiwanese filmmaker whose parents were originally from China and who studied filmmaking in America and went on to work both in the U.S. and in Taiwan, Lee is a perfect candidate with which to test different theories of authorship—not only the now well-known (if butchered) idea of the auteur (1) but also concepts of creativity in film adaptation and transnational cinema.
The class on Brokeback Mountain was an opportunity to talk about and problematize Lee’s tendency (or motif, if you want to go full auteurist) to focus on outsider characters and to often do so through the prism of sexuality. In 2007’s Mandarin-language period thriller Lust, Caution, sex and violence are intimately tied, and Taking Woodstock presents the supposed sexual liberation of the late 1960s counterculture in an ambiguous manner. I had seen Brokeback before revisiting it for that class and remember finding its first gay sex scene shocking for its brutality (I was a teen!). I now understand this violence as much more multifaceted: I see repression, anger, frustration, and sexual desire all contributing to a particularly explosive mix. Yet that first effect it had on me is hard to shake because there remains a question of representation and—you guessed it—authorship. What does it mean for these artists to portray this moment in such a way? What drew Lee (and Prieto) to shoot the scene in close-ups? How much of the mise-en-scène was dictated by Proulx’s writing and how much by Lee’s own je ne sais quoi?
Ang Lee, Auteur
What struck me on this rewatch, too, is the tenderness of Gustavo Santaolalla’s score throughout the film. Paired with the gorgeous cinematography, it almost gives the film a melodramatic Douglas Sirk quality. Yet at the same time, it makes it hard for me not to see it as a rather safe story of forbidden, impossible love, presented in the most palatable way possible with just the right amount of gay passion to spice things up a bit. Or perhaps that is the wrong angle from which to appreciate this beautiful film; perhaps Brokeback was (is?) burdened with the responsibility to say something about society’s attitude toward gay men because there were so few mainstream films about them back then, but the film (and thus Lee, his cast, and his crew) was not interested in that. This is where the limits or extremes of theories show themselves. For me, the fact that I still can’t fully square what the film is doing is a mark of its quality and, as often with this filmmaker, of Lee’s sense and sensibility. (Another way to test the auteur theory is to see whether all of the director’s films could have the same title. All of Lee’s movies could pretty much be called Lust, Caution—even Hulk.)
To look more closely at Brokeback Mountain itself, I’m not sure that Jack and Ennis are in denial per se, at least not for most of the film. They are simply trying to live their lives as happily as possible, unsure of what is best for them and others. (I have to admit that I laughed and rewound the moment when Jack tells Ennis, “This is a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation.” I almost wish this had been the film’s tagline, but I see why that, too, would not have been possible.) Again, it is testimony to Lee’s brilliance that we see them dealing with their feelings and situations in surprising and flawed yet perfectly understandable ways. It makes sense for Ennis to be wary about his relationship with Jack getting discovered, given his childhood, and Lee relies on what we now call “the trauma plot” with a sense of restraint and history. It is mostly through Ennis’s daily life, the places he goes (a very cheap diner), and the home he and Alma can afford to live in (a tiny apartment) that we get to know him and his frame of mind. The same is true for Jack: We can see how he both does and doesn’t fit in with the rodeo set, where straight masculinity dominates yet men are encouraged to take risks, enjoy themselves, and show off, directives that aren’t usually understood as hypermasculine. As a woman who rodeos, Lureen is herself an outsider, yet Lee is careful not to overemphasize the fact that she, too, wears pants. Her higher-class status doesn’t free her or her new husband from social (and sexual) norms but rather imprisons them in new versions of the old ones. When Jack finally stands up to his overbearing father-in-law and insists that his son eat the meal his mother spent three hours making without watching the game on TV, he is at once asserting his place as the patriarch of the family and showing more respect toward Lureen than her own father cares to. Perhaps this is positive masculinity or just common sense, but Lee allows the moment to be funny, as if to highlight how ridiculous and constructed the power trip of gender roles ultimately is—as if to explode the scene into its separate parts and put them on equal footing: eat, drink, man, woman.
Do you think this film has had an impact on later works about gay desire, especially in the English-language world? I’m thinking of Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers but also of Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country. I wonder whether the questions we ask around such films have changed much since Brokeback.
Nayman: Funny that you should mention Haigh since there’s a line in 2016’s Looking: The Movie that busts Brokeback’s balls a bit while giving it its due. After decamping from San Francisco to Denver in the wake of a brutal breakup, Jonathan Groff’s winsome video game designer, Patrick, meets up with his old pals and parries questions about his new digs. “Patty’s been making the most of his status as the single cowgirl in town,” jokes one of his buddies, before another pipes up. “Is it like Brokeback Mountain?” she asks. “Are you just, like, having sex with Jake Gyllenhaal?”
I really like Haigh, a sharp, perceptive, and surpassingly human filmmaker whose best film, 2011’s Weekend, isn’t styled as a tragedy or a sociological statement. Rather, it’s a meet-cute that accrues depth and significance because it observes its characters and their desires with curiosity and good humor. “Straight people like us as long as we conform, we behave by their little rules,” notes Chris New’s Glen ruefully to his lover Russell (Tom Cullen). “They like it as long as we don't shove it down their throats.” Frankly, I see more of Lee’s burnished style in the later Haigh film All of Us Strangers, which also has a literary pedigree like Brokeback and vibrates on a more melancholic wavelength than Weekend.
There are surely comparisons to be made between Brokeback Mountain and highly visible successors like Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, although the question of which films or filmmakers get flattered in that exchange is hard to answer. The same skepticism about Ledger’s and Gyllenhaal’s off-screen orientation and whether it should be leveraged against consideration of their casting—or performances—applies equally to Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name, as do, potentially, charges of a too tasteful, sanitized sexuality.
You’re right that most of Lee’s movies could be retitled Lust, Caution, and not necessarily in that order. It’s worth talking about the flip side of Brokeback’s influence, which is that, beyond its utility as pop-cultural touchstone–cum–punch line, it set a successful template for fatalism in queer representation. There’s a line of thinking that, by accruing so much critical and commercial cachet—capped by those Oscars, even if Ledger was topped by another straight actor playing gay (Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote)—Lee incentivized later filmmakers to tell sad, anguished stories about gay life and identity.
To get back to what you were saying about Lee as a transnational filmmaker, Brokeback Mountain seems to me to be as much a movie about capital-A America—and the American values that exalt one image of machismo while marginalizing another—as it is a quote, unquote “gay love story.” My favorite sequence is the one in which Ennis pummels a foulmouthed hick at a Fourth of July picnic—a burst of violence that’s as much about punishing his own 10-gallon family-man image as teaching a bully a lesson. I love how Lee shoots Ledger at a low angle, fireworks popping off behind him in red, white, and blue. Here, Ennis is placing himself and the chip on his shoulder in a mythic tradition that both inflates and shrinks the man he is inside. I also love Williams’s reaction shot, startled and unsettled and more than a little bit turned on by her husband’s determination to protect his family and his symbolic paternal turf.
In the interest of symmetry—and Lee is nothing if not a structurally sound storyteller—Jack gets his own version of this scene, telling off his obnoxious nouveau riche father-in-law at a Thanksgiving dinner that brings to mind all the other emotionally fraught banquets in Lee’s filmography. The shot of Jack gingerly handling the turkey also plays with all-American imagery and gives Gyllenhaal a rare moment of assertiveness in a movie in which his character, while well developed, generally exists in counterpoint to Ledger’s. It’s a testament to the suppleness of Lee’s direction that we never really see Ennis through Jack’s eyes, only Alma’s, while Jack is seen (and even dreamed of) from Ennis’s point of view.
The choice to have Ennis imagine that Jack was beaten to death in an act of gay bashing—a fleeting vision that runs counter to Lureen’s brutal but banal story of a tire-changing mishap—takes Brokeback to the precipice of political commentary. It evokes the real-life murder of Matthew Shepard, the University of Wyoming student who was killed in Laramie in 1998. For me, that moment isn’t just about the ambiguity of Jack’s fate but also about Ennis meditating, painfully, on his own potential capacity for violence, passed down from his father, who’d once taken him and his brother to see the corpse of a local rancher punished for shacking up with another man. I wonder whether you want to take us home by talking more about the ending, specifically Ennis’s encounter with Jack’s family and the final shot, which isn’t subtle but still strikes me as wonderfully delicate and suggestive …
Lazic: It probably says more about my poor memory than the film itself, but I had misremembered that ending: I knew it had something to do with a rediscovered shirt, of course, but in my mind, it was Jack who was crying over Ennis’s garment and his passing. Luckily, the film is a lot more layered and shattering than that. I’m not sure I agree with you that Jack’s character isn’t fully fleshed out, and the fact that he stole Ennis’s shirt early on in their relationship and kept it for decades says a lot about his tenderness and romanticism but also about how much more willing he was to accept himself and his desires. I guess I’d assumed that the more repressed and, as you say, violent cowboy would see his ways lead him to a tragic end—which they did, but not in the way I expected. It’s in that last stretch, before we learn of Jack’s death and when we see Ennis’s lonely, isolating life, that the film truly wins me over.
Living on memories and the faint hope of seeing Jack again, Ennis has a small existence, as though his self-hatred or self-avoidance were consuming him from the inside. But the news of Jack’s death forces him to become active again. The close-up on Hathaway’s inscrutable face as Lureen tells Ennis the tire story is absolutely devastating. It’s as though that shot were imprisoning her in that tale, too–reducing this once vibrant, free-spirited woman to the tragic story she has to tell to make sense of what happened. Once again, she can be only what her upper-class society deems acceptable under the circumstances, namely, the widow of a good man who died tragically while doing his job. Personally, I’ve always believed that Ennis’s vision of Jack’s last moments was much closer to the truth, and in that scene, I also sense, deep down under the surface, that Lureen and Ennis both know it. They can’t put words to it, though, and you get the sense that if they tried, the world (or at least theirs) would explode.
Strangely enough, the person who comes closest to putting words to what happened to Jack and who he was is his father, a hard and haunted man when Ennis meets him at the end of the film. He shares how Jack had talked of “coming up here with an Ennis Del Mar” and putting the ranch back into shape, bringing a barely perceptible glimmer of happiness to Ennis’s eyes (Ledger has never been more beautiful). He also mentions Jack’s new friend, another man he must have been seeing, then concludes that he will never let his son’s ashes go to Brokeback Mountain. Is he implicitly blaming Ennis for Jack’s demise? Or just letting him know that he knows but can’t part with his son? The fact that he doesn’t react defensively when his wife invites Ennis to see Jack’s childhood bedroom would suggest that he may have, finally but too late, started to accept who his son was. In that spare, terribly white house, where it seems that the moral and sexual standards of the time have ruled so hard as to rub any trace of life or color off the walls, there is nothing left to crush—nothing left to judge or castigate, and only room for grief and regret.
The simplicity of the exchange between Ennis and his daughter at the very end of the film belies a real emotional revolution within him. After some hesitation, he decides that his kid’s wedding is worth quitting a job for. Unlike Jack’s father, he wants to love his children while they’re around, and it was from Jack that he learned how to do that. He folds the jumper that his daughter forgot, then looks at his and Jack’s shirts, hanging together in the literal and figurative closet. There, too, through these garments, we see how his affection for Jack translates into his care for her. Yet there is no replacing him. His shirt wrapped around Jack’s, echoing their very first embrace, brings tears to his (and our) eyes. To bring it back to the question of authorship: To me, this ability to speak volumes through simple mise-en-scène is pure Lee. It is this quality, more than anything else, that has made Brokeback Mountain a perennially touching film.
