4K ULTRA HD REVIEW / HDR SCREENSHOTS
Left, Australian actor Heath Ledger plays Wyoming cowboy Ennis Del Mar and Jake Gyllenhaal plays Texan cowboy Jack Twist. The two are hired to watch a herd of sheep for several months mostly on Brokeback Mountain in the Wyoming Rockies. The Grand Tetons and the Canadian Rockies in Alberta provide the stunning landscape.
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“BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN”
4K Ultra HD & Blu-ray; 2005; R for sexuality, nudity, profanity and violence
Best extra: Recent commentary by writer and film historian Julie Kirgo
INITIALLY DISMISSED as “the gay cowboy movie,” “Brokeback Mountain” soon garnered nearly universal critical praise, as well as a deserved place among the great cinematic classics. Based on a New Yorker short piece by Annie Proulx, the heartbreaking love story helped launch the acting careers of its stars: Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal; and co-stars: Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway.
The story opens in 1963 in Montana, with Jack (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Ledger) meeting for the first time at the office of a sheep rancher (Randy Quaid), where they receive instructions for their job tending the herd for several months. As they work together, they slowly become friends, until one freezing winter night while sharing a tent for warmth, they become lovers, despite both men’s denial of homosexuality.
In fact, as several years pass, they marry women and have children with them. But all it takes is a postcard from Jack, and Ennis excitedly joins him for what becomes a series of yearly trysts, camouflaged as fishing and hunting trips. It’s when they’re in nature, away from everything, that they’re able to express their forbidden – and ultimately tragic – love for one another.
(1-4) Ennis and Jack meet for the first time at the office of sheep rancher Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid). (5) After getting hired they go to a local bar and Jack tells how last year, lightning killed 42 sheep.
Many felt “Brokeback” was short-shrifted by the Academy Awards for not winning Best Picture – losing to “Crash.” Still, Ang Lee (“Sense and Sensibility” our No. 2 4K disc of 2021, “Life of Pi,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) won an Oscar for directing; co-writers Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana won for best-adapted screenplay; the film won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, as well as many others, including BAFTAs, Golden Globes, New York and Los Angeles Film Critics’ awards, Independent Spirit, Critics’ Choice, and others. It’s no wonder; “Brokeback Mountain” is a work of art – a perceptive, sensitive epic tragedy that stays with you long after it ends, and has withstood the test of time.
VIDEO
Lee and Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (“Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Silence” “Irishman”) received an Oscar nomination for his postcard visuals of the wide vistas near the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, and in and around the Alberta Canadian Rockies. Universal and Focus Features scanned the original 35mm camera negative (1.85:1 aspect ratio) and Kino Lorber handled the HDR10 and Dolby Vision grading.
The 4K and Blu-ray are both sourced from the new 4K master, providing a rich color palette of earth tones, showcasing blues and browns. The overall clarity is very good, but it seems Prieto applied a lens filter to soften the look. The natural film grain is minimal and still has a striking cinematic look.
Everything was encoded onto a 100 GB disc as the video runs from low 50 Megabits per second ranging to the low 80 Mbps. HDR10 peak brightness is on the low side, 517 nits, and averages at 159 nits.
AUDIO
Kino carries over the previous six-channel DTS-HD soundtrack, with its excellent outdoor effects and the haunting, Oscar-winning score from Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla (“21 Grams, “The Motorcycle Diaries”). Dialogue is front and center, while Santaloalla’s music features many acoustical sounds including a pedal steel guitar intermixed with an orchestra. Many country tunes are laced in: “He Was a Friend of Mine” by Willie Nelson, “A Love That Will Never Grow Old” by Emmylou Harris, “King of the Road” by Teddy Thompson and Rufus Wainwright, “The Devil’s Right Hand” with Steve Earle, and “I Will Never Let You Go” by Jackie Greene.
(1) Jack and Ennis herd the flock. (2) Ennis aims for some wild game to supplement their canned beans. (3&4) Night falls on Brokeback Mountain and they keep an eye on the flock during the day. (5) The men share their first intimate moments. (6) Their relationship will never be the same. (7) Aguirre checks up on the guys.
EXTRAS
The enclosed Blu-ray houses majority of the previously released featurettes, which include: “Sharing the Story: The Making of Brokeback Mountain”; “From Script to Screen: Interviews with Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana”; “A Groundbreaking Success”; “Music from the Mountain: Featurette with Gustavo Santaolalla”; “On Being a Cowboy.”
Julie Kirgo’s commentary, which was recorded last year and included on the 4K and Blu-ray, contains plenty of interesting information and perspective — until about halfway into the film, when she begins to simply narrate what viewers are seeing on the screen, and already know well. She admits to being nervous as she discusses “a masterpiece almost two decades” after its debut.
Kirgo encourages everyone to see it, especially as she feels that the general public’s acceptance of homosexuality has gotten worse since the film was made, rather than better. “Detail and authenticity mark the entire film,” she says, who notes how unusual it was for it to have been based on a short story.
(1) Ennis marries his longtime sweetheart, Alma (Michelle Williams). (2) Married life. (3) Ennis gets into a fight with some rude men at a fireworks display. (4) Jack meets Lureen (Anne Hathaway) for the first time. (5) Lureen presents her and Jack’s son to her father (Graham Beckel).
Annie Proulx, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel (which was also adapted into an award-winning film) “The Shipping News,” called “Brokeback Mountain” a “story of destructive rural homophobia” that she said was “hard to write.” Within days of its publication in the New Yorker, Diana Ossana read it and “thought it could be a movie,” so she showed it to her screenwriting partner, McMurtry (“Hud,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Terms of Endearment”). Kirgo quotes from an article about it by McMurtry, in which he wrote, “The story had been sitting there all my life, waiting for someone to write it.”
McMurtry and Ossana wrote a “fan letter” to Proulx, who sold them the rights, which they bought with their own money. To expand the short story into a feature film, the co-writers fleshed out the scenes that dealt with Jack and Ennis’ families.
It took almost seven years for the movie to be made — and at first Gus Van Sant (“My Own Private Idaho,” “Good Willing Hunting”) was interested in directing. He had considered Matt Damon to play Ennis and Joaquin Phoenix for Jack. Pedro Almodóvar was also offered the film, but turned it down. After that, Ossana suggested hiring Lee, noting the great variety in his oeuvre. Lee envisioned the movie as one in which the “landscape itself poetizes the union between Ennis and Jack.” Kirgo calls it a “tragedy of emotional deprivation in beautiful country,” which seems to make “the heartbreak worse.”
— Peggy Earle
(1) Jack and Ennis on one of their annual getaways. (2) Ennis at home with Alma and their two daughters. (3) Jack meets Ennis’ girls. (4) “I wish I knew how to quit you!” (5) The lovers’ final goodbye.
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