Actors - Brokeback Mountain

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	Actors - Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain is a widely acclaimed BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Academy Award-winning film directed by Ang Lee. The 2005 film stars Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, and Michelle Williams. The drama depicts a sexual, romantic and emotional relationship between two men living in the American West, from 1963 to 1983. The film led the nominations with eight categories at the 78th Academy Awards and was widely seen as a front runner for Best Picture , but was ultimately upset by Crash
. The film did, however, win three Oscars, including Best Director.

The screenplay was written by Diana Ossana and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry, and is based on a short story of the same name by American novelist Annie Proulx, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner. The short story first appeared in The New Yorker in October 1997 and was subsequently included in a published anthology entitled Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999). The tagline of the film is "Love is a Force of Nature".

Plot

Brokeback Mountain is the story of star-crossed lovers Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), two young men, not even 20, who meet and fall in love on a sheep-herding job on Brokeback Mountain, somewhere in Wyoming. The film documents their complex relationship over the twenty years that follow.

After the two part ways at the end of their job, Ennis marries his fiancée Alma Beers (Michelle Williams) and starts a family. Jack moves to Texas where he meets Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway), whom he subsequently marries.

Four years later, Ennis receives a postcard from Jack saying that he will soon be in town and hopes Ennis will want to see him again. The two men reunite and find their passion is as strong as ever. Jack broaches the subject of creating a life together operating a small ranch. Ennis, haunted by a childhood memory of the torture and murder of a man suspected of being homosexual, fears that such an arrangement can only end in tragedy. He is also unwilling to leave his family.

As the years pass, Ennis's marriage deteriorates. Alma eventually divorces him and takes custody of their children. Jack hopes that Ennis's divorce will allow them to live together at last, but Ennis refuses to move away from his daughters. Unable to be open about their relationship, Ennis and Jack settle for infrequent meetings on camping trips in the mountains.

Several months after their last meeting, Ennis learns that Jack has died when a postcard Ennis sent to him is returned, stamped "deceased". In a strained telephone conversation, Jack's wife Lureen tells Ennis that Jack died in an accident. As she explains, a brief scene of Jack being brutally murdered illustrates Ennis's fears that Jack's death was not accidental. Lureen tells Ennis that Jack wished to have his ashes scattered on Brokeback Mountain. She suggests that Ennis contact Jack's parents about this.

Ennis visits Jack's parents and offers to take Jack's ashes to Brokeback Mountain. Jack's father refuses, insisting that Jack's remains be buried in the family plot. Jack's mother is more welcoming, and allows Ennis to see Jack's boyhood bedroom. Ennis discovers in this room, two old shirts hidden in the back of the closet. The shirts, hung one inside the other on the same hanger, are the ones the two men were wearing on their last day on Brokeback Mountain in 1963.

At the end of the movie, Ennis opens his own closet to reveal that he has hung the two shirts together inside the door alongside a postcard of Brokeback Mountain.

Filming locations

The film was shot primarily in Alberta, Canada. Ang Lee usually shoots his films in the exact locations in which they are set (another notable exception was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
, in which the scenes set in the Wudangshan monastery were actually filmed at another Taoist monastery), but he decided that Alberta would be an ideal place to shoot Brokeback Mountain because of its lush landscapes broadly similar to those in Wyoming, the lower production costs in Canada, and the willingness of the Alberta Film Development Corporation, an instrumentality of the Alberta provincial crown, to assist with funding.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Brokeback Mountain ]

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Actors - Brokeback Mountain

Plot

Filming locations

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