They cook beans, make coffee, share rodeo stories and do all the things that cowboys usually do. The idea of two Marlboro men having sex in a tent is, in itself, an unexpected twist on a traditional image of American manhood. In any case, nature will out, and it does one night, with a suddenness bordering on violence, when the two men share a tent. It's up to interpretation whether he knows, at first, the thing that he's trying to hide. He adopts a manner of speaking that suggests repression, a pressing down of the vocal cords as though jealous of any word that might escape. They're both tight-lipped fellows, but Ledger is the more closed off of the two. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal play Ennis and Jack, respectively, who meet when they're hired to tend a herd of sheep in Wyoming in 1963. This is necessary, because cowboys don't do much talking. "Brokeback Mountain," based on Annie Proulx's 1997 story, is directed by Ang Lee in a style that pays attention to the nuances of expression, to the thoughts and emotions being articulated between the words and in the pauses. There's no notion that either could go out tomorrow or 10 years from now and find someone else. In any case, because their attraction is not defined as some inevitable consequence of sexual orientation but as something that just happens to them, we see them as irreplaceable to each other - like Romeo and Juliet. That's one way of looking at the movie, though only one. It's possible that if these fellows had never met, one or both would have gone through life straight. The two guys - cowboys - are in love with each other, but we don't ever quite know if they're in love with each other because they're gay, or if they're gay because they're in love with each other. The situation carries a lot of emotional power, largely because it's so specific and yet undefined. Then every so often, they meet back up on the mountain and get to be themselves for a few stolen days. There are kids, marriages, jobs, nights of drinking, heterosexual flings, in-laws and holidays to celebrate, and they do everything they're expected to do, but numb. And though they come down from that mountain and go about their lives, they keep going back to it, over the course of years, because however much the love doesn't make sense, it's real - so real, it makes their lives unreal.
It makes no sense, except in one place in the world, the place where it started, on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming.