How Brokeback Mountain Holds Up—And Doesn't—20 Years Later

Time​ Magazine

5 days ago

Ol' Brokeback got us good, didn't it? Ang Lee's 2005 drama about cowboys in love was a genuine cinematic phenomenon. Brokeback Mountain helped boost stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal onto the A-list. One of its lines—'I wish I knew how to quit you'—became a source-transcending classic, referenced with the persistence and fervor of Jerry Maguire's 'You had me at hello' and Titanic's 'I'm the king of the world.' Though Lee would go on to win the Best Director award at the 2006 Oscars, the film's loss of the Best Picture trophy to Crash elicited a minor outrage, with hundreds of people contributing to buy an ad in Daily Variety decrying the Academy's poor decision. A 2015 Hollywood Reporter re-polling of Oscar voters showed that they would have given the award to Brokeback over 'that Don Cheadle movie that nobody can remember' were they to do it all over again, and in 2018 it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. A box-office hit, with an $83 million domestic gross, Brokeback was standard-setting for modern LGBTQ+ cinema. It helped show that movies about same-sex love could make real money and that playing gay was no longer the career death-sentence it was once considered.
In commemoration of its 20th anniversary, Brokeback Mountain is back in theaters, giving audiences the chance to fall for Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist's love story all over again. But it also gives us an opportunity to view the movie through a modern lens and apply contemporary sensitivities to a film that has been effectively canonized. Was Brokeback Mountain groundbreaking, or was it a gay love story trapped inside the conventions of a traditional heterosexual one? Were its central lovers authentic or merely shoved into containers its creators thought a mostly straight audience would tolerate? The answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no, and if nothing else, Brokeback Mountain remains fertile territory for pondering the representation of same-sex love in film and its continuing necessity.
To any who might think we've progressed enough to make the movie's message quaint or devoid of urgency, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. It may be true that its rerelease comes 10 years after the federal passage of same-sex marriage via the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, which helped codify social acceptance of gay people, at least for a time. But the current presidential administration's hostility toward LGBTQ people (on top of Clarence Thomas' indication that he's open to the overturning of Obergefell in his 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson opinion) suggests that Brokeback's depiction of the challenges same-sex couples face remains depressingly relevant.
In the time since Brokeback's original theatrical run, pop-cultural discourse has changed considerably. The 2010s, in particular, saw an increased focus on matters of representation in criticism and especially in social-media analysis, particularly as it pertains to the depiction of marginalized groups. It is harder than ever to ignore that no major Brokeback player—not Lee, Ledger, Gyllenhall, Annie Proulx (who wrote the short story the movie is based on), producer James Schamus, nor screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana (the latter of whom also produced)—publicly identifies as a gay man. This is gay romance by putatively straight people. Much like the plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the legal challenge to California's Prop 8, which led to same-sex marriage being legalized in the state, the Brokeback heroes were hand-picked for their seeming regularity. Two cowboys who relish manual labor, pound whiskey, and engage in horseplay, they lack many of the gender-nonconforming traits that could complicate their appeal to mass audiences. When Ennis (Legder) tells Jack (Gyllenhaal), 'You know I ain't queer,' he really means it. He's practically breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to straight audience members, too.
While the setting of Brokeback Mountain, where the pair first works together herding sheep, provides secluded idyll along the (theoretically) utopian lines of Fire Island, Jack and Ennis are largely divorced from gay culture. At one point, Jack suggests Ennis uproot his life and move close to him in Texas. Even though it is the '70s at that point in the movie and gay liberation is in full swing some thousand miles away, moving to a coastal queer hub like San Francisco is never considered. The bigger-picture stuff is ignored for the sake of telling a smallish love story.
And it's a love that seems to come out of nowhere—there's virtually no indication that Ennis would be interested in Jack before Jack makes his move and invites his co-worker into his tent on a cold night. How Jack clocked Ennis and where he got his nerve remains a question that Lee and company didn't bother to answer, as if these characters are an inherent mystery to filmmakers exploring a world that's not their own. (There's even a set-up of Ennis taking a nude sponge bath feet away from Jack that elicits not a single glance from Jack.) When they do have sex, it at least initially buys into stereotypes. Jack is the more emotive, more loquacious member of the couple and as such, he is the bottom—as far as we can tell. Granted, this is a nuanced stereotype, and it's daring that Brokeback goes there at all. Many of the mainstream depictions of men who have sex with men around its time—The Birdcage, In and Out, Will & Grace—tip-toed around sex and/or portrayed their characters as having been practically neutered.
Their hurried, relationship-consummating, seconds-long sex was much-discussed at the time of Brokeback's release, in no small part due to Ennis using his saliva as lubricant. But really, that one brief scene is the movie's only depiction of sex. Twenty years ago, the scene of their fervent kissing after having not seen each other for four years was perhaps all the passion that mainstream moviegoers could take, but it's telling that the depiction of Jack's first sexual encounter with his eventual wife Lureen (a transcendent Anne Hathaway, who deserved a Supporting Actress nod) is more explicit than that between Jack and Ennis; she's at least topless while the men remain clothed.
But if Brokeback Mountain's revolution is mostly by concession, that doesn't mean it avoided challenging the status quo entirely. Ennis and Jack both go on to marry women and start families, seeing each other intermittently for 'fishing' and 'hunting' trips. They're cheating on their wives, living lies, and yet we are still encouraged to root for them. Jack also cruises for sex in Mexico and, we learn later, brought another man to his parents' ranch to work there. His non-monogamy is an affront to the respectability politics that Brokeback Mountain otherwise espouses. It is the emotional monogamy—a common rule of open couples—that matters here. The movie encourages a sophisticated reading of the love between Ennis and Jack. Their transgressions of enforced monogamy are not to be held against them—they're doing the best with what they have and we know it.
Brokeback ultimately transcends its representational imperfections with pure heart. Even if it doesn't quite persuade us of Ennis and Jack's early attraction, Ledger and Gyllenhaal's performances sell their characters' love. This is a classic movie romance that ends up gracefully navigating the complications that its characters face by virtue of their same-sex attraction.
If Brokeback Mountain played as irrelevant in 2025, it would be a good thing, a sure sign that as a culture, we'd left toxic and time-wasting anti-gay bigotry in the past. It is a failure of our culture that in some places in this very country still, Ennis' prognosis of his relationship with Jack still rings true: 'The bottom line is, we're around each other, and this thing grabs hold of us again, in the wrong place in the wrong time, and we're dead.' Earlier this month, Tristan Kern de Gonzales, the widower of actor Jonathan Joss, shared that he and his husband endured harassment and threats 'by individuals who made it clear they did not accept our relationship,' before Joss was fatally shot 'by someone who could not stand the sight of two men loving each other.' Investigators are looking into whether sexual orientation played a role in the crime, and though they haven't yet come to a determination, it's difficult to look beyond the alleged hatred that preceded Joss' killing.
What Ennis fears, the violent murder that flashes through his mind when Lureen tells him of Jack's death as a result of an exploding tire, is still happening. Lee and company may have shaped this story to make sure it went down easy, and they succeeded in achieving the universal by invoking the longing that many feel, regardless of sexuality, for loved ones that they cannot be with for any reason. But its universality is a direct result of its precision about the complications arising from being two men in love in a specific time and place. Just as Jack sinks his hooks into Ennis, leaving him lovesick and shaken, so has this movie affected its audience. Twenty years later, it's enough to make you recite through gritted teeth, 'Brokeback Mountain, I swear…'