Scene Analysis: Brokeback Mountain
JANUARY 22, 2013
Today marks the fifth anniversary of Heath Ledger's death, so what better way to honour him than to revisit perhaps his greatest moment as a screen actor, and to remember, in my humble opinion, one of the best and most moving cinematic performances of recent times.
The scene in question from
Brokeback Mountain, marks the final, quiet moments of main character Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) as he goes about his daily business in his trailer home. The sequence is in essence a summation of the ultimate tragedy and ruination Ennis finds himself in by the story's close, although crucially it also locates the grace Ennis finds in his submission to quietly living out his remaining days in a form of worship to his lost love. Ennis may have ended the narrative in a materially weak position as a poor, "unsuccessful" man, but the film accords him the status of moral nobility.
Ennis is a man now well into his middle-aged years, he even has a teenage daughter, and much like with Orson Welles in the great
Citizen Kane, there is a knowing power/poignancy in bearing witness to the lifetime ageing of the central character through the film (it helps that both Ledger?s and Welles? are remarkably virtuoso performances too). Of course, our conscious selves know it's a twenty-something Heath Ledger, but the part of us that suspends our disbelief each time we enter the cinema, is moved by following Ennis every step of the way, through the years, as he fades away in the melancholic undertow of his thwarted affair with Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal).
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