San Francisco Chronicle - December 9, 2005
Wyatt Buchanan, wbuchanan@sfchronicle.com & Steven Winn, swinn@sfchronicle.com.

Two major straight actors star in the movie and are intimate on screen, and the film's director, Ang Lee, is one of the best in the business. This is the most hotly anticipated gay film since 1993's "Philadelphia," in which Tom Hanks played a gay lawyer with AIDS and for which he won an Academy Award. Some in the industry believe the new film could win more than one Oscar.

But the important measure of success for "Brokeback," say gay rights leaders, will be the effect a story about two cowboys who fall in love has outside of movie theaters.

"I think it will be as groundbreaking for gay relationships as 'Philadelphia' was in tackling AIDS issues," said Neil G. Giuliano, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, an organization that monitors the representation of gays and lesbians in the media.

"It will be moving for anyone who is open to seeing the challenges and difficulties of what at that time, and even for many today, is the self-imposed and society-imposed necessity to live dishonestly," Giuliano said.

Opposition so far has been relatively calm. Conservative organizations like Focus on the Family and the American Family Association plan to review the film on their Web sites for their members. While the groups regularly call for boycotts against companies that contribute to gay causes, they plan no action against theaters showing the movie.

The movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger as cowboys who meet and fall in love during a summer of tending sheep on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming in 1963. The characters are followed for about 20 years as they marry, divorce, raise children and continue their relationship in infrequent weekends back on the mountain.

Gyllenhaal, who plays a bull rider, tries several times to convince Ledger, a ranch hand, that they should be together, but he is rebuffed. Ledger is haunted by a childhood memory of a gay man who was killed for living with another man.

The local presenters of the movie hope that the "Brokeback" buzz will translate into substantial ticket sales. In an unusual move, according to senior regional publicist Steve Indig, Landmark Theatres is showing the film on three screens at the five-screen Embarcadero Center Cinema. It opened early this morning with midnight showings, a tactic generally reserved for Hollywood blockbusters in the "Star Wars" mold.

Landmark plans to open "Brokeback" in its Oakland, Berkeley and Palo Alto theaters next Friday. Nationally, the film will premiere next week in 18 other markets, including Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Still wider release, pending the performance of the film, is slated for January.

For the story to have an impact on the culture, it will have to be seen by large numbers of people outside the urban centers, said Jennifer Morris, director of programming for Frameline, which presents the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival.

"I'll be interested to see how far it gets into the mainstream -- how many screens on how many small-town multiplexes it gets to," Morris said.

Along with a clutch of early rave reviews, "Brokeback Mountain" has generated skepticism about its wider appeal, especially from conservative critics. "This is going to be a very tough movie to sell," argued right-wing pundit Michael Medved on "Good Morning America" earlier this week. "For most American guys who are not gay, there's a 'yewwwww' factor to the idea of Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger getting too up-close and personal onscreen."

"Brokeback Mountain" arrives, with all its ambiguities, in a culture that is growing accustomed to a wide spectrum of gay characters and material in theater, movies and television. Shows such as "Will & Grace," "The Laramie Project," "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and "Six Feet Under" create a context for movies like "Brokeback." The new content relies not so much on shock value but on dramatic authenticity.

Homosexual characters and themes have a long history in the movies, much of it cloaked in stereotyping, guilt or campiness. "The Boys in the Band" was widely seen as a breakthrough film when it opened in 1970, but now it seems dated. More textured treatments emerged later with films such as "A Different Story" and "Making Love."

AIDS and HIV changed the landscape in the 1980s. Movies as different as "Longtime Companion," "And the Band Played On" and "Jeffrey" addressed the issue.

With "Philadelphia," another barrier fell with the casting of a straight actor, A-list Hollywood star Hanks. Many observers have cited that film as an important precedent for "Brokeback Mountain." The mainstream appeal of "Philadelphia," which grossed $77 million in the United States, had an impact on the work of AIDS organizations, leaders of those organizations say, and gay rights leaders have the same hopes for "Brokeback Mountain" on the issue of gay relationships and same-sex marriage.

"I know for a fact that it's going to make love between two men real for the first time for tens of thousands of Americans," said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "In order to move people from not understanding or being supportive of (same-sex) marriage to being supportive is a series of small steps, not a lot, but two or three. I think 'Brokeback Mountain' is one of those steps."

The unusual contours of this film, about two men who tell each other they are not "queer" but pursue a secret sexual affair for several decades, give "Brokeback Mountain" its particular force. These iconic male figures, with their boots and cowboy hats and laconic speech patterns, tap into cultural archetypes that the original Annie Proulx story of 1997 and the film pointedly transgress. Set in the pristine Wyoming mountains and Texas flatlands of the early 1960s through the '80s, "Brokeback" invokes a kind of primal American innocence. That's what makes the gay love story at once momentous and confounding to both the audience and the film's protagonists.

The Village Voice's J. Hoberman places "Brokeback" in the "idyllically homosocial" tradition of the Western, which often involves "the programmatic exclusion of women." As such, as Hoberman writes, "Brokeback" connects to films like "The Wild Rovers" and "The Hired" as well as "Midnight Cowboy," which starred Jon Voigt as an omnisexual Texas hustler in New York, and Andy Warhol's disco "Lonesome Cowboys."

"Calling this a gay cowboy movie really diminishes it," Jeffrey Friedman says of "Brokeback." Friedman is co-director of "The Celluloid Closet," a 1995 documentary about homosexuality in Hollywood. "I wouldn't even really call it a gay movie," he says. "It transcends those boundaries by taking us away from all the familiar trappings of gay material and, for that matter, of heterosexual love stories as well. This is a story about love and isolation and the difficulties of connection. The fact that they're both men and that they're both hunks is just icing on the cake."

The New York Daily News' Jack Matthews, in handicapping the film's Academy Awards potential, wrote that "Brokeback" "may be too much for red-state audiences, but it gives the liberal-leaning Academy a great chance to stick its thumb in conservatives' eyes."

If Academy voters perceive the film as a virtuous underdog that breaks new ground, a best picture and/or several other Oscars are not out of the question. As the movie moves to other cities, the speculation alone could keep the movie in people's minds and may attract viewers curious enough to see for themselves what all the fuss is about.

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