 Starring: Matt Damon, Penelope Cruz, Henry Thomas, Lucas Black
Director: Billy Bob Thornton
Year Of Release: 2000
Plot: After his grandfather dies, John Grady Cole discovers his mother is planning to sell off the ranch he's devoted his life to. As a result he teams up with his friend Lacey and heads to Mexico – the only place left where you can be a real cowboy. On the way they come across the wild young Jimmy, a meeting that comes back to haunt them after they get work on a ranch and John falls the owner’s beautiful daughter. |
Despite being released with high hopes of Oscar glory, Bill Bob Thornton’s All The Pretty Horse’s based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, died a quick death at the box office, partly because of an uneven tone that veers from being an elegiac western love story to a dark and unpleasant thriller. However the thing that struck me when I was rewatching it, was whether the movie ended up as a template for Brokeback Mountain.
Initially I thought it was a coincidence, just because it starts out being about the close bond between two cowboys, John Grady Cole (Matt Damon) and Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas), both of whom have a tendency to mumble and find it difficult to express their feelings, even though it’s obvious they care about each other. They may not be gay, but there’s no doubt that there’s a love there, and the quiet and gentle way it’s handled seems eerily similar to Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback.
There are also the slow shots of two men riding around in wild open vistas, and even the music with its slow plucked guitars makes the two films seem far more similar than you’d expect. However, as I said, all that could have been coincidence, and having two cowboys on horses in a modern western love story is inevitably going to lead to comparisons to Brokeback.
However there’s one moment where the movies get so close that it’s difficult to imagine the makers of Brokeback didn’t at least watch All The Pretty Horses and/or read the book while they were preparing the movie. Probably the most famous line in Brokeback is Jake Gyllenhaal saying, “I wish I knew how to quit you”, while about halfway through All The Pretty Horses Matt Damon’s character says to Henry Thomas, “I’m the same man you crossed that river with... you either stick or you quit. I wouldn’t quit you, no matter what you done.” To which Henry Thomas replies, “I never quit you.”
It’s a quiet scene that underlines the bond between the men and it would be surprising if the idea of people quitting each other in Brokeback didn’t come from the way All The Pretty Horses handles its male bonding. Although in some respects it’s a very different film to Brokeback, the relationship between the men is handled in a very similar way. In fact with Lacey Rawlins never showing any interest in women, you do get the feeling that maybe his feelings for John Grady Cole are a bit stronger than just seeing him as a friend.
There’s always the chance that it is complete coincidence, but it does seem that Brokeback took how Billy Bob Thornton presented the relationship between John Grady Cole and Lacey Smith in All The Pretty Horses and applied it to E. Annie Proulx’s story of gay cowboys (Proulx’s story gives the outline of the events in Brokeback, but it’s very short and so much of the meat of the film had to come from elsewhere). If that is what happened, it has to be said that Ang Lee and screenwriter Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana used it in a far more effective way than Bill Bob Thornton and writer Ted Tally did in All The Pretty Horses.
TIM ISAAC
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