Born in Taiwan and later educated in the United States, Ang Lee became a prominent arthouse figure with light romantic melodramas, as The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman signified an ability to address the conflict between traditionalism and modernity within Eastern society. Although it wasn’t a surprise that Lee’s sensitivity earned the attention of Hollywood studios, it was unexpected to see the diverse culture he could spotlight; Sense and Sensibility was among the few Jane Austen adaptations that didn’t collapse under the density of the text, The Ice Storm examined the tragic underpinning of America’s sexual revolution, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was an unabashedly maximalist celebration of wuxia martial arts.
Hollywood clout affected Lee; despite his detail-oriented approach, he was incapable of redeeming projects that were out-of-touch with the industry’s direction. Lee’s revisionist western Ride With The Devil wasn’t entertaining in the vein of Old Hollywood gunslinger films, but lacked the emotional subtext of more recent efforts within the genre, like Unforgiven or Tombstone. Similarly, Lee’s stagnant, special effects-laden attempt to make a Hulk origin film felt laborious when compared to the more joyous approach Sam Raimi had took with his Spider-Man trilogy.
Although it was inevitable that Lee would return to his roots to make another intimate character drama, his interests intersected with a high-profile adaptation that became a centerpiece within a cultural war. Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” originally ran in The New Yorker, where it was seen as a conscious subversion of the heightened masculinity present in a majority of western fables. The writing was episodic and detached, as much of Proulx’s work was, but Focus Features intended its adaptation to have the sweeping scope of an Old Hollywood epic. Larry McMurtry, the author behind The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment, produced a script that emphasized the tragic yearning that kept the two lovers separated for a lifetime.
Brokeback Mountain wasn’t intended as a rallying cry; the fact that the film was perceived as transgressive was a consequence of Hollywood’s trepidation with LGBTQ stories. The rare queer films to attain mainstream success were broad comedies (The Birdcage, In & Out), issue-oriented (Boys Don’t Cry, Philadelphia), or filtered through the perspective of a straight character (As Good As It Gets, Chasing Amy). It was Lee’s embrace of historical immersion that gave Brokeback Mountain its timeless quality; while the film captured the torpidity of 1960s Southern culture, it showed no concern for how it would be received by audiences in 2005.
Although romantic epics like Dr. Zhivago and Gone With The Wind were an inspiration, Lee understood that Old Hollywood could only be replicated through the creation of new stars, as any instantly recognizable faces would’ve brought their own baggage. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal weren’t unknown when they were cast in Brokeback Mountain, but neither had developed a definitive persona that tied them to specific qualities. The wry, charismatic demeanor Ledger developed in 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight’s Tale didn’t pigeon-hole him to heartthrob roles because of the grittier work he did in Monster’s Ball and The Patriot; similarly, Gyllenhaal’s involvement with niche indie projects like Donnie Darko and The Good Girl indicated he could play slick, yet tormented characters in the awkward phase between adolescence and manhood.
Brokeback Mountain was groundbreaking because it crafted characters who were defined by more than their sexuality, and addressed the confusion that both protagonists faced when liberal sexual expressions weren’t discussed by supposedly “polite society.” Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar is a thoughtful, yet terse working man who developed a standoffish nature, as he viewed fellowship with the ignorant as an insurmountable burden; Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist is the intuitive, yet insecure heir to a conservative family, and has been determined to carve his own identity that’s independent from those privileges. The affection between them did not emerge on a moment’s notice, as they are young men whose minds gravitated towards their own self-interests; Lee tracked their romance through a series of all-too brief moments, each of which served to make their forced separation more devastating.
Lee’s disregard for the judgments that would inevitably be cast upon Brokeback Mountain led to a film in which even the most minor of characters was granted with interiority; Michelle Williams’ Alma Beers, the bride of Ennis, isn’t a cold, judgmental barrier to her husband’s romance, but a heartbroken mother left to question if it was her failings that inspired his homosexuality. Even Randy Quaid, an actor renowned for his eccentricity, brought an aura of authenticity in his role as Joe Aguirre, the aged rancher that initially paired Ennis and Jack together. The recognition that people are flawed, and individual failures are often the result of overarching social biases, was a tough to swallow for those that desired for Brokeback Mountain to be more poetic. Yet, the realism that Lee achieved made his depiction of bigotry even more gut-punching; the suggestion that Jack was killed by an angry homophobe is more devastating because it's left to the imagination of both Ennis and the viewer.
Unfortunately, Brokeback Mountain’s lasting legacy is that it lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to Crash. In a year in which the fellow nominees included Steven Spielberg’s gripping historical thriller Munich, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s depiction of the titular writer in Capote, and the journalistic drama Good Night, and Good Luck, the decision to award a film as cloying and regressive as Crash was insulting. That its victory came at the price of honoring Brokeback Mountain suggested that the perception of Hollywood liberalism was a facade.