FROM what I've been hearing, it sounds like "Brokeback Mountain" is a pretty good bet to win a few Oscars on Sunday. I've got no quarrel with that. It's a beautiful movie: poignantly told, splendidly acted and gorgeously photographed. It's got something for everyone.
I, for one, am thinking about nominating it as one of the great food films -- maybe even of all time. That will probably take some of you aback. But then your mouths probably weren't watering as those rivers of little white lambs defied gravity rolling happily uphill on their way to summer pasture. All of those chops, shanks, saddles and \o7gigots\f7, merrily on the move! Granted, maybe I'm an exception -- though it did seem to me that that image seemed to be repeated throughout the film with intoxicating regularity.
Still, there certainly aren't a whole lot of what you'd normally think of as standard-issue food scenes in "Brokeback." It's no "Big Night" or "Babette's Feast." You're not going to hurry home from a matinee anxious to repeat any of the dishes for dinner, not unless you have an inexplicable affection for canned beans.
But that does not mean that food is not an important part of the movie. Remember, it was directed by Ang Lee, who earlier did the cuisine-rich "The Wedding Banquet" and "Eat Drink Man Woman." He is not a filmmaker blind to the charms of fine cooking.
Rather, I think the lack of good grub was an artistic choice, meant to reflect the narrowed lives of the main characters and their deliberate turning away from comfort, perhaps even joy.
Let's face it, these are guys who lived on canned beans for weeks before they noticed and even then it took another couple of weeks before they did anything about it. Plainly, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar did not think a whole lot about food.
That's pretty much true to life, judging from my experience with cowboys and cuisine. I have to say I'm pretty skeptical of the combination right from the get-go. I know that there have been books written about cowboy cooking, but I don't know of any that were written by actual cowboys.
And I think I'm probably in a position to know. Well before I ever started to think about writing about cooking, I wrote about cowboys. Those are two remarkably different subjects and as far as I know I'm the only one who has done both. It's a narrow niche, but it's all mine.
