Fred Wemyss

I got on the Long Island Railroad train tonight and saw BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN at Loew's Lincoln Center. Hearing that the transit strike might take place in another 36 hours inspired me to do this today. I just don't want to see it with a Long Island crowd. The New York City audience loved it. I think it will be a popular movie, but I don't want to be in an audience of people who find that what is being depicted is alien, no matter how they feel by the time the end credits roll.
SPOILERS, SPOILERS, OVER THE BOUNDING MAIN:
Larry McMurtry has thrown in a little humor, which helps in the translation from E. Annie Proulx's short story to the screen. The story has been opened up, but only in ways relating to things implied in the story. All the key ingredients of the story remain.
When I heard a few months ago that "Brokeback Mountain" was not only being made into a movie, but that Ang Lee was going to be the director, I got the collection WYOMING STORIES from the library and read the story. I had a memory of it appearing in THE NEW YORKER about nine years ago and that I had begun to read it and somehow had put it down and not continued. I gather now that a different story, winding up in the same collection, was in that issue of THE NEW YORKER and that "Brokeback Mountain" appeared in Esquire. In any case, I'd been aware that Proulx had written a story about gay cowboys (and I have to ask the various writers who have said it isn't about gay cowboys, "What do you mean?") and I'd always meant to read it. When I did get a hold of it and read it I mentioned it in passing at a meeting of my book group. To my surprise, when somebody then suggested we read it, the group almost automatically decided to count it as a candidate for our next selection. I always talk about other things I've read, but this time the group was so interested it selected a book (or story within a book) which I hadn't even been suggesting we read. I'm very glad I got to read it before seeing the movie. In the movie, there was a flashback which I'm not sure I'd have perceived as a flashback, even with the face of a character suddenly shown as much older in the scene just after the flashback.
There is a SHAMELESS use of the phrase "the ice storm" in a bit of dialogue. THE ICE STORM, of course, is Ang Lee's absolutely great adaptation of another American literary work, this one a novel also called THE ICE STORM, by Rick Moody. I consider that movie just devastating. The dialogue about an ice storm may be in Annie Proulx's story, but, if you will, sometimes Hitchcock just has to make a more subtle cameo. Nevertheless, Ang Lee has earned the right to refer to himself and it may be that, like McMurtry, Ang Lee felt the story needed some levity.
Maybe I'm not so glad I read "Brokeback Mountain" before seeing BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. I find I'm not sure how I feel about it. I can certainly say that I think Ang Lee tipped us off too early about what Randy Quaid's character was doing. The short story does it in a short and sweet (short and bittersweet) way. The audience laughed when they discovered what he was up to, but when I read the story I gasped. Of course, as I write this I'm thinking of a very intelligent decision Lee made in his camera use here. I won't give it away, but he avoids a cinematic cliche (most often seen in movies circa 1935-65) while simultaneously tipping us off that something unusual is happening. He updates a cliche, if you will.
There's a scene in Mexico which demonstrates Ang Lee's obsession with detail. We're in a border town and we hear a girl shouting "Chicles," "Chicles." When I was eleven my family was in Nuevo Laredo, just below the Texas border and there were old women selling little, cellophane-wrapped 4-packs of Chiclets gum. They kept murmuring "Chicles," "Chicles." How many people actually know that in Mexico, you hear the word "Chicles" being repeated as you walk along? Ang Lee is at least one person who knows. I'm sure Larry McMurtry could be the person who suggested the detail, but Ang Lee would be the director who asked. I've read that when he made THE ICE-STORM he asked anybody on the set who'd been about twelve or thirteen in 1974 how their bedrooms had been decorated then. Ang Lee is from Taiwan, but THE ICE STORM so perfectly captures the Watergate-era America that I remember that I find it frighteningly real. It took somebody from an entirely different culture to see tragedy in what most Americans see merely as an embarrassment.
Anyway, he has now taken a great short story and turned it into something a lot of people are going to see. The publisher has issued the story as a book in itself. There are actually a lot of books which remain alive because great directors have chosen to film them: THE MALTESE FALCON is a case in point. It should be reiterated more often that, more often than not, books adapted for the screen are good books.
And a high proportion of good movies come from books.