This review is part of the Literature World Tour.

The choices we make and those we don’t

[*Warning: includes significant spoilers*]

Let me put my cards on the table from the off and say that while I do love the film [adaptation of Brokeback Mountain] (it may actually be the best since The English Patient), I think that the story in its original form is even better. There are things you can say in text that you can’t fully and deeply convey in a visual medium. I’m not sure, for instance, how on earth Mr Lee could ever have hoped to express the opening paragraph of Proulx’s story in film, a paragraph all but shimmering with memory, loneliness and loss:

Ennis Del Mar wakes before five, wind rocking the trailer, hissing in around the aluminium door and window frames. The shirts hanging on a nail shudder slightly in the draft. He gets up, scratching the grey wedge of belly and pubic hair, shuffles to the gas burner, pours leftover coffee in a chipped enamel pan; the flame swathes it in blue. He turns on the tap and urinates in the sink, pulls on his shirt and jeans, his worn boots, stamping the heels against the floor to get them full on. The wind booms down the curved length of trailer and under its roaring passage he can hear the scratching of fine gravel and sand. It could be bad on the highway with the horse trailer. He has to be packed and away from the place that morning. Again the ranch is on the market and they’ve shipped out the last of the horses, paid everyone off the day before, the owner saying, “Give em to the real estate shark, I’m out a here,” dropping the keys in Ennis’s hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.

Really, it’s all there – all the aspects and themes of the story are contained in this paragraph, but the reader isn’t allowed to know the full meaning of them yet. It’s one of those astonishing paragraphs that are incredibly punchy to start with, but when you come back to them after you’ve finished the story they take on a whole new meaning: the shirts; the poverty of Ennis’ life; the transitory nature of the work he does; the choices he makes and doesn’t make; his difficult family situation; the way he saves the mention of Jack until the very end of his thought process; and how that opens out a whole baggage of painful emotions that both breaks through into and is contained by the physical facts of his life.

One of the many charms and strengths of this short story is the length of time – nearly twenty years – that the text encompasses. It’s quite rare in a short story for such a long time period to go by, and Proulx uses the landscape and the men’s relationship both as a binding factor and a driving force. Time is also used in the tale to create tension, especially the passing of time, and the accompanying sense of a rapidly approaching grief:

One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.

Set against this are the moments of joy Jack and Ennis share, particularly the long and half-asleep hug that takes place during their summer on Brokeback. In the book, this scene carries a lot of power and the embrace lasts for a long time, while in the film it feels rather cut short – I do feel Lee could perhaps have made more of it at that point. However, this concept of time and its fluidity, as well as the contrast between deeply-held moments and the rapidity of life is something that the fiction writer can play with far more easily than the film-maker. Indeed it is fascinating to note that one of the major differences between the book and the film is that the book shifts its time period back and forth as the story is told, whereas in the film the timeline is largely linear. Perhaps it has to be. A film without a linear timeline is rather challenging to watch, though not impossible. However, the loss of the book’s rich time shifts has to be compensated for in the visual medium, and it is here that the film comes into its own: the mountains and meadows, the rocks, the grass, the skies knit their own voluptuous tapestry across the screen, as indeed does the music, – itself an essential part of the Brokeback viewing experience.

I have also to consider the end of the story. In the same way that I think the beginning of Proulx’s tale is far superior to the film version, it’s my opinion that so is the end of the written text far superior to that offered by the visual medium. In the film, Ennis stands, after his daughter has gone, and gazes at the two shirts that have come to mean so much more than the reader could know at the start. As he talks, he’s half crying and the shot then fades. It’s very powerful (though I’ve seen it before and know exactly what happens, I was still in tears), but here’s Proulx’s final scene:

And he (Ennis) would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.

We’re back to the beginning again, but all the reader’s sensibilities and understanding have utterly changed in response to this incredible journey of love, loss, grief, pain and supremely difficult choices that we have been on in the company of Ennis and Jack. Nothing is different but everything has changed. Impossible for any film to catch even a quarter of that kind of emotion.

For those of you who’ve read the book, it’s quickly apparent how much of the actual dialogue from the short story is used in the film script throughout. Lee has kept very close to the words Proulx used and the themes she has focused on and I can only admire him for that. That said, the film itself is a powerful entity and in some aspects I have to say it succeeds more effectively than does the book, opening out areas and deepening secondary characters that Proulx only chose to touch on.

Proulx herself had very interesting things to say in a 2005 interview about the book and the film, and the reactions she’s had to both. It’s well worth a read. In any case, for me, both book and film demonstrate beyond all doubt the devastating power of choices in our lives – those made and not made. In this way it goes beyond a simple tale of two gay cowboys in the wild west and becomes a story that can speak to us all: about the choices we make, the people we leave behind; and those we cling to. It’s both a story and a film about how we live now.

This review is adapted from author Anne Brooke's contribution to Vulpes Libris. Please visit Vulpes Libris to read the full review.

Previously in North America: Lottie's review of I am Legend

Next stop on the Literature World Tour: South/Central America and the Caribbean!

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