In anticipation of
the Academy Awards, let me conjure up the odd casting that occurs
in the 1939 epic ``Gunga Din,'' starring Cary Grant. This George
Stevens movie takes its title -- and not much else -- from the
famous Rudyard Kipling poem about a water carrier for the British
army in 19th-century India. In the movie, the Indian water carrier
-- ``Of all them blackfaced crew/The finest man I knew/Was our
regimental bhisti, Gunga Din'' -- is played by Sam Jaffe, a New
Yorker who got his start in show business by acting in the Yiddish
theater. As the saying goes, if Kipling were not already dead,
this would have killed him.
What brings Jaffe
to mind is ``Brokeback Mountain,'' which is up for Oscars Sunday
night in a variety of categories (best actor, best director, best
picture) and which is good enough in any of those categories to
win. It is, as you must know by now, the story of two cowboys
and their decades-long love affair. It's a terrific movie.
But in one
sense, it is an odd movie -- as odd as ``Gunga Din.'' If it now
seems strange that a Jewish New Yorker would play an Indian, then
it might someday seem even more strange that two gay cowboys were
played by two straights. In fact, around the time of the movie's
opening, the fan magazines -- no doubt doing the bidding of publicists
-- pictured the two leads -- Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal
-- in all their robust heterosexuality. People magazine,
for instance, showed Ledger with his girlfriend and new baby.
Get the point?
As a result, ``Brokeback''
is not quite the radical movie it is often said to be. Nonetheless,
it is certainly the first major American movie I can recall where
two men fall in love, just as a man and a woman might, and follow
all the usual rules of cinema courtship: Two people meet, there
is an almost instant sexual attraction, a night of sex that changes
everything (there is no such thing as safe sex) and then they
embark on a long, hopeless romance. Chekhov did this best in his
unforgettable short story, ``The Lady With the Dog,'' but doomed
romances -- roads not taken -- are a staple of all the arts, if
not of life itself.
Where ``Brokeback''
is different -- and critically different -- is that its protagonists
are gay and in the closet. This means it's not an occasional weekend
that's a lie, but an entire sexual life. As Daniel Mendelsohn
put it in The New York Review of Books, the movie ``is a tragedy
about the specifically gay phenomenon of the 'closet' -- about
the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression.''
It is, therefore, not just a nonconventional love story about
roads not taken. It is about a kind of suffocation.
My friends in the
movie business tell me it should not matter if straights play
gays. They regale me with tales of leading men and women who hated
one another -- and were applauded afterward for their cinematic
sexual chemistry. We know, too, that gay actors have played straights,
and successfully so. Rock Hudson is not suspect as Elizabeth Taylor's
husband in ``Giant,'' nor is Montgomery Clift out of place as
Taylor's lover in ``A Place in the Sun.''
Still, it says something
not just about Hollywood, but our times, that the parts of gay
men were played by heterosexuals. It suggests the era when whites
``blacked up'' to play blacks or, incredibly, when blacks did
the same thing. (Bert Williams, maybe the greatest entertainer
of the vaudeville age, was a black man who worked in blackface.)
Once, men played women on the Elizabethan stage. It's hard now
to see Juliet as a man and Romeo swooning for her under that balcony
in Verona. It is just as hard for me to believe that Ledger and
Gyllenhaal had an ounce of attraction for one another -- at least,
I didn't see it or feel it.
Hollywood has no
major gay actors -- none out of the closet, that is. ``Brokeback''
needed some star power, otherwise it would have been a minor gay
art film. So the producers got two straights to impersonate gay
men -- and then reassured everyone in sight that they were not
gay at all. Whatever this is -- and it is worthy in its own terms
-- it is not a revolution but rather a statement of how little
things have changed. In more ways than one, ``Brokeback Mountain''
is a tragedy.
©
2006, Washington Post Writers Group
