The movie belonged to Ang, and thank goodness he made it go for two hours....
I disagree. This movie does not belong just to Ang Lee. Brokeback Moutain, as the entire production team, -including Ang- has said, is a product of a colaboration between a group of people which includes the director, the actors, the screenwriters, the director of photography and so on. The director has a lot of creative power, no doubt about it but he does not make the movie alone. For example, when Ennis finds the shirts, Jack's is outside and Ennis's is inside. Then, when we see the shirts on Ennis's closet, his shirt is outside, and Jack's is inside. That was Heath Ledger's idea, not Ang Lee's or anybody else's. Movies are a product of colaboration and creative work, all movies. I believe Jake Gyllenhaal himself has said it.
If Proulx wanted to describe things in more detail, she should have written a bigger book....something I have always had a grudge against her for not doing.....
IMO, the short story is fine, and has the necessary information it needs to convey the message. It's a short story and not a novel. I don't think the author wanted to make it a novel. She does give a lot of information, and important details. I don't think it needs further descriptions. For example, I know a lot of people disagree with this, but I for one think its pretty clear in the short story that Jack quits Ennis. Proulx actually says it, and so does the movie. But some people has interpreted this information in a different way, which is valid as well.
Something I've learned is that no writer ever writes an idea, word, sentence or phrase on a text just for the sake of writing it. Everything has a purpose, whether it's technical, symbolical, informational or whatever. If you erase the line where Jack's dad tells Ennis that he had another fellah coming to help him lick the ranch back into shape, the plot stays unchanged. You don't even need it to know that Jack's dad was a jerk. I think it is pretty much stated when Ennis notices his angry expression upon laying his eyes on him for the first time. Ennis realizes that Jack's dad was like other patriarchs, a common "type with the hard need to be the stud duck in the pond." So, IMO the comment about Jack bringing another man to live with him would be really out of context if it didn't mean that Jack had indeed quit Ennis.
It also seems to me like a natural outcome, considering the difficulties in their relationship and the fact that they were seeing less and less of each other, as time went by. If you recall, Jack tells Ennis "you used to come easy, now's like seeing the Pope." I think that means that Ennis was not comming to see him as much as he used to when they first got together after 4 years apart. Jack was having a hard time with this. He was unhappy, cranky, and IMO he felt forced to look for sexual comfort some place else. I think he wanted to settle down with somebody, a man, and since Ennis kept refusing him, he decided to find someone else. This doesn't mean he stopped loving Ennis. After the argument Jack finally realizes that Ennis wasn't going to change his mind (the dozy embrace), and there was nothing he could do about it. (PS. I know there's another thread about Jack quitting Ennis but IMO the dozy embrace has a lot to do with it.)
But, I think it's OK to critique Proulx a little bit. And, I also think the characters in the movie are very different (in the case of Ennis... extremely different) than the characters as written in Proulx. By the time two screenwriters a director and two actors start adding their two cents the characters grow beyond just belonging to Proulx. Lee's decision to include TS2 and the happy tussle already contradicts the idea that Ennis didn't want to kiss Jack or embrace face to face.
I agree with this. The process of turning the short story into the movie has made it somewhat different from the original one. One thing I have notice is that Ennis movie is more taciturn than short story Ennis. For example, on the short story when they're at the motel, Ennis does tell Jack he's in love with him, which is what prompts Jack to come up with the idea of the cow and calf operation. He doesn't actually say I love you but he tells him:
"When we split up after we got paid out I had gut cramps so bad I pulled over and tried to puke, thought I ate somethin bad at that place in Dubois. Took me about a year to figure out it was that I shouldn't let you out a my sights. Too late then by long, long while"I think Ennis is letting Jack know what are his feelings for him. This doesn't happen in the movie.
Despite of this, I think the screenwriters as well as the director tried to keep it as intact as possible. In fact, Diana Ossana, in the interveiw included in the DVD extras explains why there are some differences. She said that she and Larry McMurtry had the intention to adapt the story to screen just as Proulx wrote it. But when the first draft was finished, it wasn't long enough to be a movie so they had to expand situations, and make up new ones so it could be long enough. For a 2 hour long movie, you need a 120+ pages long screenplay. One page equals one minute in the movie, more or less.