Adapted from the short story Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
In the summer of 1963, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist get a job tending sheep on Brokeback Mountain. To their surprise, they find that they have developed romantic feelings for each other, and begin a passionate love affair. When the summer, and consequently the job, ends, the two go their separate ways and attempt to move on with their lives apart, but their feelings are not so easily repressed.
This was a much more faithful adaptation than the previous winner. Almost everything from the short story made it into the movie, and all the things that were added were perfectly consistent. Adapting a short story, rather than a novel, into a feature film allows the story to be expanded rather than edited, but what I've noticed with some of the other winners based on short stories is sometimes so much is added that it's barely recognizable as the same story. That was certainly not the case here. Most of the additions consisted of showing more details of events that were briefly touched on in the story, and further developing some of the characters, particularly Ennis's daughter. The adaptation is unquestionably telling the same story as the original, just in a slightly different way to suit the change of medium. In other words, it's a very good adaptation.
This win is a refreshing departure from the typical straight-washing that many winning adapted screenplays have been guilty of. The most noticeable offender was probably A Beautiful Mind, but several other original stories had LGBT+ characters who were either eliminated or portrayed as straight, or at the very least their sexuality was not mentioned. Granted, since this entire story is about a homosexual romance, it would have been very difficult to erase the LGBT+ element completely, but I could see the movie downplaying it, or making it seem like one of them was a predator while the other was really a well-behaved straight boy, or ruining it some other way. But surprisingly, Ennis and Jack's romance is portrayed on screen almost exactly as it unfolded in the short story. The movie doesn't show quite as much sex as the book describes, but it's all implied. Both men do marry women in the movie, but that's consistent with the original, and with the time in which it's set. Overall, I'm impressed. Is it the best adaptation ever? No. But is it a lot better than one would have come to expect, given the subject matter? Absolutely.
Coming up is another stretch of Best Picture winners, starting with The Departed, which was the first remake of a feature film to win this award
No comments:
Post a Comment