Director
Ang Lee
Leading Actors/Actresses
Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger,
Supporting Actors/Actresses
Randy Quaid, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway
Genre
Drama, romance
Language
English
Awards
The Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and three Academy Awards for the Best Director and Best Original Score
Date of Release
13 January 2006
Producer
Diana Ossana, James Schamus
Setting and Context
The action in set in West America between the years 1963 and 1983.
Narrator and Point of View
The action is presented from an objective point of view but there is no narrator.
Tone and Mood
Tense, tragic, dramatic, violent
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonists are Ennis and Jack and while there is no character to be a protagonist, the protagonist can be seen as being the prejudiced society that can’t accept a homosexual relationship between two men.
Major Conflict
The major conflict is an internal one and is between Jack and Ennis’s homosexual desires and their belief that what they do is wrong. They fear how the others will react and so in the beginning they refuse to acknowledge their feelings and claim that they are not homosexual.
Climax
The film reaches its climax when Ennis finds that Jack died.
Foreshadowing
The wild horse that appears in the beginning, when Jack gets ready to go with the sheep foreshadow how he will be affected by his feelings for Ennis.
Understatement
When Ennis tells Jack that they will never have sex again proves to be an understatement as they break their word that very night and they sleep with one another once more.
Innovations in Filming or Lighting or Camera Techniques
N/A
Allusions
One of the things alluded in the film is the way homosexual people were regarded in America during the time when the action was set. Homosexuals were looked down upon and what was even worse was that people treated them with violence. Ennis even remembers a gay man killed in his hometown because of what they did and Ennis became so scared by what happened to those two men that he refused to accept the idea of coming out as homosexual.
Paradox
Jack makes Ennis feel like a hypocrite for lying to his wife about their relationship but paradoxically, he does the same thing to his wife.
Parallelism
At the end of the film, Ennis draws a parallel between the fate a man he knew had because he was homosexual and Jack’s death. In Ennis’s mind, there is no difference between them and Jack’s death was not an accident but rather was provoked by someone intentionally.
