Brokeback Mountain

Usually, when a film wins Best Picture at the Oscars, the inevitable backlash takes years, if not decades, to come to the surface. Sometimes, it’s simply because the “wrong film” won (Crash over Brokeback Mountain, Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan), and on other occasions, it is because a film’s social or sexual politics have dated incredibly badly. (Here’s looking at you, American Beauty.) Yet after what must be the most contentious and controversial Oscar season in living memory, during which no fewer than four separate films were all tipped for glory at one point, the eventual victor ludorum, Sean Baker’s Anora, is facing a vicious and sustained assault on its credentials that is without precedent.

Brokeback Mountain, a play with music, opens in a scruffy bedroom where a snowy-haired tramp finds a lumberjack’s shirt and places it over his nose. Then he inhales. Who is this elderly vagrant? And why is he absorbing the scent of an abandoned garment? Two hours later, at the play’s close, we finally learn that the old man, Ennis, is sniffing a shirt that once belonged to Jack Twist who became his lover while they worked as shepherds in Wyoming. Yes, shepherds. The ‘gay cowboy’ label is a misnomer because the lads are ranching sheep, and their affair belongs to the half-forgotten days of homosexual persecution. The precise year, 1963, is signalled to us with a clunky line from Jack about JFK’s decision to escalate America’s involvement in Vietnam.