Heath Ledger has died and I have finally dried my eyes, although some old pains have been resurrected. Heath always gave a totally believable and insightful performance; always enjoyable; sometimes intense like in Monster’s Ball and sometime delightful as in A Knight’s Tale. His most complex and defining role was no doubt his portrayal of Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain where he showed all of the above; the flaws of a real person as well as his ability to capture the subtle dimensions that make us who we are. It is this role that most captured my heart.
Director Ang Lee is quoted as saying, “he brought to the role of Ennis more than any of us could have imagined, a thirst for life, for love, and for truth, and a vulnerability that made everyone who knew him love him.” I did not know Heath, at least not personally or directly, but his work speaks for itself, it spoke to me and his work I loved, thus I loved him as well.
Every time I now hear the reference “gay cowboy” film, I know that as a culture we have a long way to go still. I cringe each time I read it. It’s like calling Romeo and Juliet a gay swordfight play. I mean after all Mercutio was quite delighted and there were sword fights. How one manages to miss the crux of the film, a love story between two men, neither of which was “gay,” is enough to cause me to sigh with deep and extended exasperation. We don’t seem to get the devastation of divisiveness.
But Heath’s artful performance showed the simple humanity of the character and even more importantly to me that somewhere someone understands that reality. He demonstrated aging and the despair of a broken heart some twenty or twenty-five years later. Inspiring from a man who died at age twenty-eight. Besides his portrayal, I am equally inspired by the fact that the story is written by a sixty to seventy-year old woman, Annie Proulx. How did she come to have such an understanding of the intimacy between men as what jumps off the pages of her short story. No doubt she sees the humanity that exist beyond the cosmetics of gender.
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