**Looks at picture***sniff* Poor Ennis. Always seems to me his first instinct there is to pull away from Jack's hand, not wanting to acknowledge his own vulnerability and hurt - but then he lets Jack start stroking his cheek/ear, accepting the comfort and intimacy of it - in contrast to the previous Brokeback bear incident.
And as for Ennis's ears - who hasn't got a thing for Ennis's ear in the motel scene? I know I do!
On to something else:
The scene at the "lonely old ranch" where Ennis is trying to calm his two squalling daughters: I won't ever admit to how many viewings of the film it took me before I realized that Alma doing the laudry in the kitchen is also visible there, behind Ennis - she's scrubbing away as seen through the glass panes of the children's room door *and* the kitchen window. I thought that was a great subtle detail and one that might well not have been there (knowing how scenes are always filmed out of sequence and how actors come and go from the set, - they might have filmed the scene with Heath and the children while Michelle was half the world away).
That Alma's also visible there together with Ennis and their daughters really changed and enhanced that scene for me. Instead of being specifically about Ennis as good father caring for the girls, enclosed in a small room, it becomes about Ennis and Alma and their whole
little house on the prairie - the four of them as a family - the efforts and co-operation it takes to keep that little family going - their joint struggle as young, poor parents living out in the middle of nowhere. It therefore adds further nuance and depth to Ennis's trying to be a "proper" husband and father, and to the conflict in his mind in the immediately following bedroom scene with Alma. The little detail of Alma seen through the window makes the reality that is "him and Alma" even more *real* to me.