Absolutely not. What could be accomplished. Showing Ennis living as an old man who dies broken and lonely? I couldn't bear to see him with anyone but Jack and he wouldn't want to be with anyone but Jack.
Actually, I think that the biggest problem with this movie is that it overstates the significance of the J/E relationship. I don't think that Ennis was the love of Jack's life. Annie Proulx probably killed off Jack not because she wanted to highlight the tragic 'Romeo and Juliet' quality of the film, but because that is the standard formula for many short stories/movies about gays : someone has to die, usually the gayest one.
The tragedy of the story is that Jack spent his life chasing a hopelessly dysfunctional, maddeningly incurious, pathologically hypocritical, psychosexually confused straight man who believed that his infrequent couplings with Jack were nothing more than the the libidinous equivalent of a bad toothache that he couldn't get rid of. The tragedy of this story is that Jack wasted his life chasing after a lost cause, not that Jack and Ennis were never allowed to spend their lives together.
Ennis was as dead and lifeless as a man as the prairie landscape he surrounded himself with. That Jack spent his life chasing after someone so completely incapable of giving love in a healthy manner to anyone is truly tragic.
The Jack Twist character was so courageous and forward thinking. The only mistakes he made were that he fell in love with the wrong person (Ennis) and married the wrong person (Lureen). He should have moved to a more progressive rural community, settled down and left Ennis behind.
If Ennis had died (and he was already dead man walking) and Jack had lived, then I'd be the first person in line for a sequel because then we'd have a chance to see a gay life truly lived.
With my post-Stonewall sensibility, I have absolutely no interest in the Ennises of the world.
Thanks ghent!!
The film is NOT that good!! In many ways, it could be better. Even if it can be considered already a classic!!
The main character died, yes, but how? Killed because he was a gay man??
Yes, and in the eyes of many heterosexuals, early death is the ultimate end for gay men, through a tire iron, alchohol poisoning or AIDS. Take your pick. The implicit message is that Ennis didn't die because he wasn't truly gay. I don't need a sequel to get the point.