From the LA Times, “How’s it Playing in Wyoming,” by Gil Brady.
“You’ve taken the last thing we had,” said the ranch hand, who declined to provide his name. “We don’t get any money, you work us like dogs — then you take our image … and then gay it up.”
How’s it playing Wyoming?
In the state where ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is set, the film draws raves from some, anger and surprise from others.
By Gil Brady
Special to The Times
December 26, 2005
JACKSON, Wyo. — Near the snowy plains of writer E. Annie Proulx’s imagining, many filmgoers are having a love affair with “Brokeback Mountain.”
The so-called gay cowboy movie that has become this season’s critical darling opened at one playhouse here Friday. While business was slower than expected, the film earned rave reviews from those in attendance. But not everyone has fallen for Ang Lee’s awards-sweeping vision.
As a gas, coal and oil boom here gives birth to satellite towns that are slowly eating away at ranches and open prairies, many cowboys have already been left to wonder whether America has any love left for them. And that was before one small movie redefined their remaining dignity, they say.
One 23-year-old ranch hand who spends his summers wrangling horses for tourists on this side of the Tetons, explained his surprise when he heard that someone had made a movie about two Wyoming cowboys in love. “We was drinking coffee around a broken cattle chute waiting to get fixed” when someone broke the news, he said, making clear that he had no intention of seeing it for himself.
“You’ve taken the last thing we had,” said the ranch hand, who declined to provide his name. “We don’t get any money, you work us like dogs — then you take our image … and then gay it up.”
Frank Londy, who owns the movie theaters here where “Brokeback” premiered and then opened Friday, said he took a gamble by placing the unconventional love story in the larger of his playhouses. More people are passing it up in favor of “Walk the Line,” leaving him screening “Brokeback” to a theater that is barely 20% full. But he said he has no regrets: “I loved the movie.”
Ashley Robbins’ two-hour drive from Pinedale to make the first matinee along with three friends underscores “Brokeback’s” struggle for mass appeal in the state of its fictional setting.
“I pick all the movies for the Pinedale Entertainment Center,” said Robbins, 21, “and we’ll never get [“Brokeback Mountain”] there because it’s about gay cowboys in Wyoming. People come in and request that we do not get the movie.”
Despite the film’s near-religious devotion to portraying the hardscrabble details of the life, the Stetson class’ response to the movie that is prodding the heartland to examine itself has been anything but cool indifference.
A recent letter to the editor of Planet Jackson Hole, the local alternative weekly, headlined, “Broken-backed community,” denounced same-sex love as “perverted” for producing “death and disease,” concluding that homosexual acceptance was a symptom of moral decay.
But others have been more philosophical about all the hoopla. “So why is two cowboys’ relationship with each other anyone else’s issue? Aren’t cowboys citizens too?” asked local livestock breeder Terry Amrein, 60. “Don’t they have the right to do whatever they want in their private lives?”
Amrein, who has not seen the movie, added that openly gay cowboys, while rare, have been known to exist.
Many in this blue patch of semi-tolerance bounded by red-state conservatism expressed hope that the movie might help humanize a culture that just seven years earlier produced one of the nation’s most shocking crimes: After leaving a gay bar in Laramie, 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was tied to a fence and beaten so badly that he died of his injuries several days later.
“Matthew Shepard’s murder was a terrible thing,” said Steve Adamson, manager of CorralWest, a store that sells ranch clothing and other goods, adding that he plans on taking in the movie to see if its seven Golden Globe nominations are deserved.
One 35-year-old gay man, who asked not to be identified for fear of losing his job over his sexual orientation, was not entirely taken by “Brokeback.”
“I’d give it an ‘8,’ ” he said, adding, “The story was classic. I feel Ang Lee was bold to make this film. And the actors were fantastic in bringing this story to life.” The slow pacing, he said, was its only flaw.
Others said that perhaps Wyoming’s biggest fear of this picture lies in its power to broaden the horizons of the young beyond what the old can bear.
After leaving the screening Friday, moviegoer Samantha Kirby, 18, stood outside the clapboard theater and said the movie made her more sensitive to how others are treated. “Watching the movie,” Kirby said, “it changed my perception, because people are people.”
Another fan of the movie, Keith Schradar, lamented that at the end of the day, few people in this state are likely to see “Brokeback Mountain.” And that means the real-life Ennis Del Mars who are out there fixing fences, pulling calves or working the oil fields and enduring stoic lives for weeks on end bunking with men, and “the uncharted impulses this lonely intimacy brings,” are likely to miss a perspective that might otherwise liberate them.
Regardless of how widely the movie plays here, state tourism officials are seizing upon its awards season popularity. There are promotions for “gay-friendly” adventures such as wagon-train rides, outings at dude ranches and, reported tourism official Michell Howard, overnights in a tepee, all to tap the lucrative gay and lesbian market.
From my favorite working critic, NY1’s Neil Rosen.
”...But the pacing is at times slow, it’s a bit predictable, there is a lot of preaching going on here, and director Fernando Meirelles, who also made the acclaimed “City of God,” seems more concerned at times with imparting a moral message than he is in making an entertaining thriller.”
Neil Rosen’s Big Apple Rating: Three apples
Thank you, Neil. Thank you for reminding us that an entertaining thriller need not bog itself down with moral message. Ok, people? Are you listening? Let’s keep politics in the senate and good clean mindless frivolity in theaters. Giving Gardener three apples, to boot!?!? That only shows what a fine and generous soul you are when faced with sub-par filmmakers who are obviously just trying too hard (why not throw in a mercy half-apple here and there?). I mean, you only gave D.E.B.S. two and a half apples:
”...the movie has clever moments and overall it does manage to be funny and endearing. Now some people may find the film idiotic. But that’s basically the whole point here. It’s campy, silly fun and if you look at it on that level there is a good time to be had.
It’s also real easy on the eyes to have four sexy school girls, who in reality are in their twenties, running around in plaid mini skirts fighting crime. And I do think, among other things, that was one of the clear intentions of the filmmakers. “
Re-reading your insightful comments here is both galvanizing (as an aspiring critic) and tough to swallow; I mean, Neil, when you can watch four sexy school girls fighting crime, why on earth would you sit through something like The Constant Gardener? There’s not even that much gardening! I’m going to have to reverse-criticize your criticism on this one: I’d take that half-apple from Gardener and feed it to those hot little mama’s from D.E.B.S.
But that’s why I love your work, Mr. Rosen, you get me thinking. And sometimes, you get me thinking in terms of apples. And at the end of the day, this New Yorker wants it laid out straight: just tell me how many apples, and I’ll go bobbing.
Just a little friendly mono e mono between critics, buddy. You’ll always have four big apples in my mind.
p.s. Your pronunciation of Meirelles? Priceless. Fernando Mary-Ellis himself would appreciate that.
From his rave review of Pretty Persuasion, a turn of phrase that could come from no one but the NY Times’ own SH:
“Watching Pretty Persuasion is like passing through a sudden, violent thunderstorm; behind it, the air is fragrant, and the visibility extends to the horizon. Think of the movie as a clearing shower.”
Uh…right. And people complain that Reverse Shotters are obtuse.
In case anyone was wondering where Mike D’Angelo went after leaving Time’s Up New York—and I’m sure that’s about, oh, none of you—he’s still out there fucking things up for the rest of us. As a fitting epitaph for this year’s Cannes, I offer this bit of genius. Boldly, the widely loved Mr. D’Angelo has made a daring choice for his own personal (hairy) Palme d’Or: yes, that’s right, after sitting through the latest Dardennes, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Egoyan, and Haneke, he still would have awarded the top prize to Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, because, you see, “for sheer formal bravado, nothing else in Competition could match it.” Then he mentions that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne would receive the Grand Prix as consolation. I suppose one could make the argument that the two films would represent two extreme poles of filmmaking, aesthetically as well as emotionally, and that they’re both indicative of cinema’s capability to harness sensation in wildly differing ways. But then you could also easily say that one is worthless misogynist tripe wrapped up in clunky sub-Romero comic book cum-shots while another furthers one of the most sublime humanist oeuvres in recent cinema history. You be the judge.
Oh really, can I be the judge? Thanks dude. OK, D’Angelo should stop trying to justify his latent adolescent fanboy tendencies by decrying other “fanboy wankfests,” and swearing it’s not usually his sort of thing. Either wholly embrace your stash of Creme de la Face or Squirters Vol. 17 tapes hidden in those Arnaud Desplechin video sleeves or just shut the hell up.
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