Here’s the big bad spoiler: there’s a love story in Brokeback Mountain (2005, rated R, 135 minutes). It has cowboys. It has scenic mountains. It has pickup trucks and big empty spaces. What could be more all-American?
The love erupts as a stunning revelation, there is gentleness later, and disappointment that can’t be contained. There is real love, and there are the hobbling constraints that Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Heath Ledger) cannot overcome. 
In the end, the world outside their world won’t let them be different, and happy.
In the end, too many women are victims. Jack and Ennis can’t give up on each other, but they can abandon the women who love them.
In the end, there is a bloodied shirt that is a delicate memento linking Ennis to Jack, a symbol of the wounds they bore, and the hurts they inflicted on each other.
In the end, there is Brokeback Mountain. There is a big empty space where love should be.
Based on the novel by Annie Proulx
The Minuteman Library Network also offers:
- the audio book version
- the digital audiobook, instantly available on Hoopla
- the DVD or BLU-RAY version of the movie
- a related book, On Brokeback Mountain: meditations about masculinity, fear, and love in the story and the film by Eric Patterson
- a related book, Close range: Wyoming stories by Annie Proulx with watercolors by William Matthews
