Cadillac Jack (1982)

(Requested by reader C.A.)

Larry McMurtry is a writer much beloved in Hollywood circles and for good reason, reminiscent of the careers enjoyed by Elmore Leonard or Willam Goldman. Various of McMurtry's novels have provided the basis for the movies Hud, The Last Picture Show, and Terms of Endearment, plus he wrote the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. His biggest achievement, literally, may be Lonesome Dove, which sprawls across 800+ pages and was made into a TV miniseries of 6+ hours. Cadillac Jack may or may not be among his best (I've only read Lonesome Dove besides this) but it has many of his most familiar themes, even if it didn't become a movie, and it's well done. McMurtry has always been basically a writer of Westerns, the genre trappings are familiar, but with the great idea of updating the tone and stories to the 20th century and beyond. Accordingly, Cadillac Jack is set mostly in the Washington, D.C., of Ronald Reagan's first term. The times, contemporaneous with the writing, are reflected partly in the free and easy sexual charge that accompanies much of the action. Jack McGriff has earned the sobriquet of the title by his outsize personality and by the "pearl-colored" Cadillac he drives around in. Formerly a rodeo performer, he is now a savvy antiques dealer with a natural talent for it. He's 33, with two ex-wives and many more former girlfriends (a few of which are made in the span of the novel)—a kind of lost soul, but not really, and in any event amiable and easygoing enough about it. Not a lot of plot to this one, but novels and stories where not a lot happens are high on my list, and plot isn't McMurtry's strong point anyway, which is more on the order of mood. Just so, Cadillac Jack is pretty good about casting its spells. McGriff hangs around D.C., sleeps with some women and lusts after others, takes time for feeling sad about things now and then, and sorts out his life's work piecemeal. In some ways, it's a kind of post-Western crossed with the classic novel of manners; there's some sense McGriff is searching for a wife. Everyone is interesting or intriguing, more or less, and there are various shades of maneuver in pursuing who he will march down the aisle for the third time, if indeed he's going to march anyone. McMurtry was in his mid-40s at the time he wrote this, and that's how McGriff feels too. I thought he was a little bit unbelievable as a 33-year-old (a distractingly fraught age in fiction). It's a novel about a midlife crisis essentially. McGriff is likable and that redeems most of the minor misfires. McMurtry is also a very quiet and poised writer, and it's that quality that makes this novel worth looking into, even as it reminds me again that I really need to get to some more of his stuff.

In case it's not at the library.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Canada/USA, 134 minutes
Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana, Annie Proulx
Photography: Rodrigo Prieto
Cast: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Linda Cardellini, Anna Faris, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams, Randy Quaid, Roberta Maxwell, Peter McRobbie

Ang Lee's gay cowboy western romance is an always interesting and often unpredictable mix of the general and the highly specific. First, obviously, it addresses the ways that denial and repression brought on by social pressure and stigmas associated with being gay or otherwise "other," whether internalized or imposed from without, only compound and literally worsen everything for everyone. This falls under the category of "the general," but the picture is highly effective in getting at something that is too often maddeningly elusive, particularly with regard to those who will not see. This, in fact, may be its single greatest strength. Ennis Del Mar (played by Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) meet as two lonely young Westerners scratching out a living in 1963, taking a summer-long job working together in Wyoming tending a herd of sheep. They fall in love, neither one able to handle what has happened to them. "I ain't no queer," Ennis tells Jack the day after their first sexual encounter. "Me neither," says Jack. But this one summer would prove to be the idyll that neither of them could forget, and that both longed to return to for the rest of their lives. After it is over, Ennis will marry his sweetheart Alma a few months later and then father two girls with her. Jack, for his part, knocks around the rodeo circuit awhile before marrying and settling down in Texas. A few years after their summer they are seemingly locked into their life choices. Then Jack looks up Ennis and almost immediately they take up where they left off, and both are overwhelmed and shaken by the depths of their feelings. From then on, even as their families come to suspect them and it leads to numerous problems in their lives, they continue to meet once or twice or three times a year for a few days or a week at a time. It is heartbreaking to watch time escaping them, to see them aging, with both feeling so trapped by their circumstances. And here is where the story becomes highly specific, not just some by-the-numbers quasi-Sirk melodrama of gay love frustrated, but a story of two specific individuals in love, making specific choices and suffering specific consequences. In that regard, though it is to everyone's credit that they attempted it, I have to say I'm not entirely convinced. I don't trust, for one thing, that screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana or director Ang Lee or short story writer Annie Proulx actually know enough to make the movie work on the level of specificity they intend. But that's only hindsight, after multiple viewings began to produce a sneaking feeling of hollowness, and me trying to put my finger on the reasons. I continue to be surprised often by how much of it does work—the performances of Gyllenhaal and particularly Ledger are subtle, complex, and brilliant, it's a beautiful thing to look at, and its heart (and politics) is in the right place, which I count as a plus.