Jake remembers Brokeback - everyone is so good you kind of forget you're in it

Many thanks to Libby for directing us to this interview with Charles Wuorinen, the composer commissioned by New York City Opera to write a work based on Brokeback Mountain. Many of us have already made up our minds for or against this venture, although, as has been pointed out, we do have five years to get used to the idea. But aside from the opera itself, the suggestion of a further adaptation of Annie Proulx' story and vision - a different interpretation by someone who has been as moved as any of us but is fortunate to be gifted in a field where he can express that emotion - is a fascinating subject: the realisation that Annie wrote something so profound that there is room for more than one dramatisation of its tragedy and message.



So, if Charles Wuorinen is someone who has read the short story of Brokeback Mountain and has been moved profoundly, then his words in the interview about what the story means to him, as opposed to the film, should give us much food for thought about what the story means to each of us. As a reader commented today to the last post, it makes one compare the different treatments of the mountain in the story and in the film, and wonder about the extent to which Ang Lee coloured the story for his own interpretation. Also, how much has each of us brought of ourselves to our reading of the story, or our viewing of the film, and how much of that is because of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar on the page or Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger on the screen.


Ang wasn't the only one to impose his own interpretation - Jake and Heath also went through their own emotions filming. Although, presumably, told where to stand and what to say, their own sense of the loneliess and that lack of connection that the characters felt, permeated their portrayal and colours our own interpretation of the story. Can one read the story or watch the opera without that sense of Jake and Heath? Charles Wuorinen argues that, in 2013, you can and you will.



It sounds as if things are at that 'delicate stage' with whether Annie will write the libretto for the opera herself but Wuorinen envisages a work different from the film: 'I think it will follow the story. The film has its own character, and I am not partial to referencing the film. One thing the film fails to do is to make quite clear the degree to which the landscape, the mountains, the effect it all has on the characters. It's a very hard and unforgiving environment in which these people have to function and it does prevent them from taking the kind of escape routes they might otherwise have. I know that Annie Proulx is very much engaged by this question, not just in this story but in others that come from the same collection. I want to make sure that we have elements of menace in the landscape clearly delineated."


While I have always thought of the mountain as a place of nurture for the love between Ennis and Jack - where they can express themselves, free from social confines - this idea of the danger or menace of the landscape is something one senses Jake felt a little of during the filming. Jake has spoken of the grandeur of the Canadian landscape but he has also said on more than one occasion that he was lonely there - that it was the windiest place he'd ever been, that the roads were straight as a dye, that there was nothing to do but sit and think - either in his trailer or in a hotel room far from home. Can these big open spaces - with their contrast of warm sunshine and the kind of storms in which sheep and riders are run off the mountain's face - can these be empowered on a stage?


In this article in the Calgary Sun, Jake discusses the locations: 'Cowley is the windiest place I've ever been to in my life. The wind never stopped blowing. People told us it's the windiest place in the province and maybe one of the windiest places in the world. I can vouch for that.' Jake also says: 'We were living in the trailers and it was spectacularly beautiful country, but it was also really lonely. It really began to affect Heath and I, but that's exactly what Ang wanted. He wanted us to experience the loneliness our characters felt. Just looking at the Alberta landscapes as Ang filmed them, you get a real sense that it's being so lonely that brings them together. Straight or gay, everyone understands the concept of loneliness and how it makes you search out someone to help fill that void for you.'


Also, as Ang Lee once said, it's not just the mountain - it's that sky with everything it can throw on the people below: 'You realise when you place the camera that you have to tilt it up a little bit; the sky is so grand. It's not only the big landscape, but the big sky.' This feature also gives more background to the stunning Canadian scenery selected so well by the film production.


In December 2005, Jake talked to the St Paul Pioneer Press about what he saw as the scariest scene to film - that traumatic last scene between Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar: ''That was so scary, the last scene Heath and I shot together," he recalls. "We finally get to say to each other what we want to say, and I was really nervous because there were so many emotions and both men have been holding so much back. Luckily, the dialogue is so great that it worked out." Early response to "Brokeback" has been good, and Gyllenhaal, who says he's a harsh critic of his own work, concurs: "It's great to have bragging rights on a movie like this, where everyone is so good that you kind of forget you're in it."' (If I can find a free link, I'll post it.)


This I have to disagree with in Charles' interview: 'I would imagine that by the time this is produced the film won't be on people's minds much anymore. The group interested in the operatic stage is not the same public interested in film. If we're talking about 2013 at the earliest, I would imagine that the film will pretty much have faded. My interests in this are on the merits of the work.' This is one film I cannot envisage fading - it will always win new audiences and those of us first touched by it during the winter of 2005/2006, I don't see many of us going anywhere.


Includes pictures from IHJ, Indiewire, Bruno Press and View Images