I went to see it when it first came out with my friend Jane from work. I don’t always get out much these days, and over the last eighteen months or so we’ve started going semi-regularly to the cinema, as a chance to do something different and break the monotony of the working week. Jane shares an office with Jamie, who’s our resident film critic, who advises us on what’s hot and what’s not. He hadn’t seen Brokeback Mountain when we first mentioned we were thinking of going to see it, but he said he’d heard good reviews about it, so we went.

The last time I cried at a film I think I was probably something like seven years old, and it was Bambi, but by the end of Brokeback Mountain I was in tears, right there in the middle of the cinema, in fact even before the end because it was like watching some awful slow motion car accident – you knew there wasn’t going to be a happy ending (but it didn’t stop you from hoping), you knew that something was coming, but like that slow motion accident where you knew that sooner or later that car was going to hit that central reservation, you knew that sooner or later something bad was going to happen.

I think I just about held it together up to where Ennis gets the postcard, but through the film I’d been fighting the urge to get up and scream at the screen, “Just tell him!” I think it was probably the scene where Ennis goes to the Jack’s parent’s house and finds his old shirt, still unwashed, in the wardrobe that really set me off.

Brokeback Mountain was always going to be so much more than “that gay cowboy film” and though there are always going to be those who can’t or won’t see any further than their own prejudiced and short-sighted view of the world, I think a good many people, at least those who’ve actually seen it as opposed to thinking they know what it’s about, were genuinely moved by it. I remember the day afterwards going to Amazon to buy the DVD, and reading all the comments and reviews on the film and spending a good half hour just reading through all the comments on the film. Just the words that people were using in the title of their reviews gives you a flavour of the responses – “sad”, “moving”, “haunting”, “beautiful”, “breathtaking”, “a masterpiece”, to name but a few. One reviewer said that it had helped her to make sense of her father’s sexuality, and for so many people it really touched them. You’ll even find my review amongst them, though I have to say, I think my review at the time was much more succinct than this ramble. As I said at the time, the film gets in your head and stays there.

As one reviewer put it,

I realised, a week after I’d seen it I could not stop thinking about it, worrying about the characters, fearing for the future. It was as if I’d had a disturbing and very vivid dream, which kept pulling me back.A Customer

Someone else said,

I can’t say much about this movie other than when i first saw it, I cried for days; uncontrollable and without reason. Even now, when I see an image from the movie, my heart misses a beat, and I go into deep thought.Philip Butler

If it matter’s at all the film’s true to the short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’ by Annie Proulx, which I also felt compelled to get and read after seeing the film. I got the soundtrack too, and though I don’t listen to it as much as I used to, I’ve still got “An angel went up in flames” from the soundtrack as the ringtone on my mobile.

When I heard that Heath Ledger had died, I was at work, buried in a database, and it was the throwaway comment of a colleague as she left the office that brought me out of my database overdrive stupor. I felt the same cold sense of dread I remember from watching the film when I heard the news, and a single word kept popping into my head repeatedly, “Why?” Such a waste of an awesome talent. The news of Heath Ledger’s death had pretty much the same effect on me as when I first saw the film. For a good few days afterwards my thoughts kept drifting back to it and I had to resist the urge to watch the film over again, but the fugue-like state persisted, and those words kept coming back to me, “I wish I knew how to quit you”.

I can think of few other actors who can really bring a film to life in the way Heath Ledger did in the character of Ennis Del Mar, and fewer still such actors who have such a breadth of talent and such a wide variety of roles they’ve so successfully and skilfully brought to life. You only have to look at Heath Ledger’s list of credits to see just the variety of roles he was comfortable with.

The last film I saw him in was actually an earlier film, “The Knight’s Tale“. I was in hospital just before Christmas, and being bored with no internet access to speak of, I was leafing through my TV magazine in search of suitable viewing material when I came across the listing for “A Knight’s Tale” and as there was nothing much else on, decided to watch that. I’d no idea what it was about really other than that it was a comedy, and I’d been watching it for 10 minutes thinking there was something vaguely familiar about the lead character, William Ledger, before I twigged it was Heath Ledger! That too’s a great film by the way, and a great watch for all the family – hilariously funny and harmless for even younger viewers, but with some subtle jokes that only the adults with fully appreciate. I went and got the DVD and soundtrack of that too.

Tonight though another line from Brokeback Mountain’s just come back to me, Ennis to Jack, “If you can’t fix it, Jack, you gotta stand it.” I guess that’s a new take on the old serenity prayer about accepting the things you can’t change, courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Tonight while wandering about the web doing a little research for this post (yep, it’s that damned researcher in me again that’s obsessed with researching everything to the nth degree!), I came across a Flickr pool that’s got some awesome Photoshopped fanart, as well as tributes to Heath Ledger. On that Flickr pool there’s a photo of a bunch of flowers with a postcard tucked underneath it that says simply “Thank you for Ennis”. I think that just about sums it up.