Western movies are a pillar of great American cinema. Evoking the likes of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, many classics of the genre hail from ’50s action flicks to ’60s spaghetti westerns to modern entries like 3:10 to Yuma and, more recently, Killers of the Flower Moon.
There is another film in the conversation of best western films by film critics – Brokeback Mountain. The New York Times listed the Oscar winning 2005 on their list of favorite westerns since 2000. Ang Lee’s adaptation of a short story about thwarted love saw A-listers Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as cowboys who meet one summer in the 1960s when they are hired to herd sheep on the fictional Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming.
“The lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee’s epic western, Brokeback Mountain, is as bone deep as the movie’s heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident,” praised Stephen Holden in The New York Times’ 2005 review.
“It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon.”
Twenty years later, the film continues to be highly rated by regular viewers. On Rotten Tomatoes, 88% of critics’ reviews are positive, with an 82% approval rating by members. It has a 4.1 rating out of 5 on Letterboxd.
Rotten Tomatoes’ critic consensus states: “A beautiful, epic Western, Brokeback Mountain’s love story is imbued with heartbreaking universality thanks to moving performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.”
New York Times praised Ledger, who “magically and mysteriously disappears” in the skin of his character whilst Gyllenhaal’s pain and disappointment registers in his “sad, expectant silver-dollar eyes”.
The movie is based on a short story by Annie Proulx originally published in The New Yorker in 1997. It has been adopted into a play for the London West End and opera of the same name.
“Brokeback Mountain is far more than a gay western,” wrote Rick Moody in 2005 in a review for The Guardian. “It’s a great American love story.”
Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams play the leads’ wives as the film follows cowboys’ fraught love story over the years.
Is Brokeback Mountain a western film?
Entertainment Weekly’s ranking of the 35 best Western movies from 1990 to 2024 placed Brokeback Mountain in fifth place, dubbing it an “essential” inclusion on their list.
“Though far from a Western in terms of structure, Brokeback Mountain is a powerfully emotional look at the model of American masculinity and the cowboy, and how that model fails two men completely,” the publication noted.
“Anchored by four stellar performances from Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, and Anne Hathaway, the film is an essential entry in the genre, regardless of its utter lack of shoot-outs.”
They upheld the movie’s status as a western film, adding: “Anyone doubting Brokeback’s status as a Western should note that the script was penned by Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry and his co-writer, Diana Ossana.”