Hello
This is the first time I post here although I have been completely obsessed with BBM for almost a year now, and I have done a lot of lurking. You guys never cease to amaze me with your insights and your eye for details!
As regards the hats, Jack wears a brownish hat, ie darker than Ennis but lighter than his own, on 3 occasions and on all those occasions he asks Ennis to come and live with him: at the Reunion, after the divorce, when he suggests Ennis moves to Texas. This intermediate colour could therefore be something like mingling, becoming one? By the final weekend at the lake he has a black hat again, he has lost hope of being together.
Randall has a brownish hat too - willing to share a cow and calf operation, if only Jack asked him?
As for Ennis's grey coat at the end of the film, it has a very distrubing resemblance with that of his father when he showed him Earl : Ennis is convinced that homophobia has killed Jack. Perhaps he even thinks that his own homophobia contributed to Jack's death: without this prejudice he would have had the sweet life with Jack.Jack would not have died this way.