YMMV / Brokeback Mountain

• Adaptation Displacement: Not many people are aware that the movie is based on a short story with the same name.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Though the setting makes them sympathetic for doing so, regardless of one's views on homosexuality, this is still a story about two guys unapologetically cheating on their wives for twenty years.
  • What prompted Ennis' father to show him the dead gay man? Did he suspect that his son wasn't straight and was trying to scare him? Or was there no prompting and he just wanted to instill his prejudices into his son at an impressionable age?
  • Is Lureen telling the truth about Jack's death? Does she genuinely believe that her husband's death was because of an accident or does she know all along about Jack's sexuality and that his death was the result of a hate-crime? The fact that Anne Hathaway claims that she herself didn't know, they recorded the scene twice with two motivations in mind, and they mashed together the result as the final cut doesn't help.
• Award Snub: Movie critics generally see the decision to award Crash with Best Picture over Brokeback as one of the biggest Academy Awards mistakes of the decade, if not all time. It's become an even greater consensus in the years since, as Crash has not aged well compared to that year's other Best Picture contenders. The voters are commonly accused of wimping out by awarding a movie with the relatively safe message of "racism is bad."
• Awesome Music: The music from the trailer ("The Wings") is very touching, and it became a staple of Slashy Fan Vids. But it's very cool on its own merits.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: The way people talk about this movie, you'd think it consists solely of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal having sex in a tent, plus a part with Anne Hathaway topless.
• Common Knowledge: Even if they've never seen it, everybody knows that the film is "the gay cowboy movie." Even though they're shepherds, not cowboys. And their sexuality is left ambiguous enough to leave open the possibility that they're bisexual rather than outright closeted gays. It could even be a case of If It's You, It's Okay, considering that neither of them had any other homosexual relationships before each other, and never have any after. Jack could be gay or bi, considering he attempts to solicit a gay prostitute, but this could just be a case of missing Ennis, whereas Ennis never shows interest in any other man than Jack.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • When Ennis finds his and Jack's shirts hanging in Jack's childhood closet, Ennis's is tucked inside Jack's. By Heath Ledger's idea, they are reversed when Ennis takes them home after Jack's death. The shirts can also be interpreted as each other's heart. Jack putting Ennis's shirt inside his indicates that Ennis has always been inside Jack's heart. Ennis putting Jack's shirt inside his symbolizes that Jack will always be in Ennis's heart. Annie Proulx approved so much of this detail that, years later, she included it in the libretto for the opera adaptation.
  • Ennis and Alma's divorce is finalized in 1975 - notable because it's a Time Skip of several years and their marriage had clearly been in poor shape a good 7 years earlier. However, no-fault divorce only became legal in many states during the 1970s, and the divorce rate in the United States rose dramatically starting in 1975. Alma got that divorce as soon as she could without having to damage Ennis' reputation by proving his affair (let alone his gay affair) in court.
• Genre Turning Point: The film's smashing critical and financial success (growing a whopping more than 10 times its budget for a movie marketed explicitly as a gay love story) along with its infamous Award Snub in the 2006 Oscar has opened the floodgate for queer entertainment to enter the mainstream that isn't relying on stereotypes.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The second night in the tent; not only is it the first tender, romantic scene in the film, it also seems to be the first time that Ennis ever experienced any kind of physical love and/or affection from anybody. Plus Jack is very gentle and patient with Ennis, in spite of his nervousness of being with another man.
  • While it is unknown whether or not Jack's mother knew her son was gay, but unlike her husband, she is kind and hospitable towards Ennis when he arrives (offering him coffee and cherry cake), allows him to keep the shirts from Jack's closet (which Jack held onto all those years since their first time on the mountain), and even invites him to return if he wishes to.
  • Ennis deciding to call off work for his daughter's wedding (despite the financial hardship this will cause him), and giving his daughter and her fiancee his blessing; "To Alma and Kurt!"
  • Jack and Ennis's reunion in 1967 (four years after their initial relationship up on Brokeback Mountain), starting with a warm hug and followed up by Ennis giving Jack one hell of a kiss. (It doubles as Tear Jerker since Alma sees them kissing and realizes that her marriage is, to her at least, essentially over.)
• Hype Backlash: The film's portrayal of homosexuality has aged rather awkwardly, to the point some commentators think people only care anything about it because it lost to Crash at the Oscars.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Jack and Ennis unapologetically cheat on their respective wives and had an affair with each other, constantly lying for years. Despite, or maybe because of this, they are miserable in the decades that follow their meeting on Brokeback Mountain, unable to have fulfilling and steady lives with both each other and their own respective private lives. Even factoring the cheating nature of it, nobody deserves the suffering.
  • Ennis, instilled by his father that homosexuality is bad by having to see the gruesome corpse of a suspected homosexual tortured to death by townsfolk at the age of nine, is torn between his feelings toward Jack, his family life (especially his daughter), and the social stigma of two men living together. As a result, everything in his life falls apart; he and his wife get divorced, he was unable to find love with another woman even though Cassie falls for him, he financially struggled all by himself due to child support obligation to the point he has to live in a small trailer with few furnishings by the end of the movie, and he had no chance to further his relationship with Jack aside from occasional "fishing trips," breaking his heart time and time again, because he was afraid of people's persecution. Worse, he learned how deep and serious Jack's feelings had been toward him right after he found out Jack had died, denying him of a chance for another happiness in life.
  • Jack obviously had a strong feelings for Ennis and was serious about forming a relationship with him, once planning on building a cabin together on his family's ranch for them to live together and help "lick the ranch into shape." However, Ennis couldn't reciprocate because of his own problems above leaving him anguished for a very long time, unable to move on for 20 years. Despite having better financial condition, he is trapped in an unhappy marriage where Lureen seemingly cares more about her job than her family and his father-in-law obviously doesn't like him. In particular, after hearing Ennis had a divorce with his wife, Jack immediately drove to Ennis's, thinking that things between him and Ennis could finally change and Ennis had finally decided to live with him only to go back in tears after another rejection. When it looked like he was able to move on from his love to Ennis as indicated by his father saying he invited another man to work on the ranch and planned to leave Lureen he had to die before he was able to find happiness in what is implied to be a hate crime disguised as accident.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "I wish I knew how to quit you."
  • "Brokeback" has pretty much become synonymous with "gay." For example, "No Brokeback!" is the battle cry of guys with man-crushes, while "Playing Brokeback" has entered the modern Hong Kong vocabulary, meaning homosexual relationships.
  • The music of "The Wings," just put the music over clips (with The Shawshank Redemption theme in the second half of the clip) with Heterosexual Life-Partners from pop culture franchises like Star Trek, Back to the Future, and Harry Potter, it becomes instantly gay. It's extremely popular for making Fan Vids.
  • "Sometimes I miss you so much I can hardly stand it."
  • "This is a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation."
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Ennis's childhood flashback of seeing a man (deemed as a homosexual) mutilated and killed, with his corpse lying in an irrigation ditch.
  • Likewise, the scene in which Jack is beaten to death mercilessly by homophobic thugs, which may or may not have been the case (according to the viewer).
• Periphery Demographic: Amusingly, a lot of the Fix Fic sent to the author of the original short story is sent from straight men.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Kate Mara played Ennis' oldest daughter, Alma Jr.
  • David Harbour, later well-known for his role in Stranger Things, makes an appearance as Randall Malone, the married man who takes an interest in Jack at the Texas Charity Ball.
• Tear Jerker:
  • In particular, the two shirts.
  • The speech leading up to "I wish I knew how to quit you." Despite going memetic, the line in context was very emotional.
  • "Ennis, girls don't fall in love with fun!"
  • Lureen visibly struggling to keep it together while telling Ennis about Jack's death, implying that despite her being an Ice Queen and their marriage having long been Dead Sparks, that there may have still been even the tiniest bit of love left.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Lureen Newsome, who did nothing of importance in the final third of the movie. She didn't even react to the confrontation between Jack and her father! This is even more notable in the story in which she only appeared in one scene (to tell Ennis about Jack's death).
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Some parents took their kids to see the film just because it was about cowboys. However, it has multiple sex scenes and in the end one of the main characters is beaten to death, or at least may have been.
• The Woobie: Alma, who only wishes for a happy family, witnesses her husband passionately kissing another man. Let alone the homosexual nature of the relationship, she sees her husband cheating while they had been financially struggling with two kids to raise. She was aware that the fishing trips were all just a façade and she could pick the sign that her husband's love gradually diminished. She is still emotionally scarred from the experience even after their divorce, as seen during the Thanksgiving scene.

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