B+ Directed by Cindy Meehl Review by Jon Kissel |  |
The details of Buck Brannaman’s lifestyle are such that if he were a fictional character, no one would believe them. His childhood and his chosen profession are so inextricably linked that they would seem to spring out of the pen of a hack writer pounding away at Starbucks, taking a triumphant sip after tying up a character’s entire motivation. Cindy Meehl’s intimate documentary about Brannaman, the inspiration for Robert Redford’s titular character in The Horse Whisperer, works as well as it does because of its basic, elemental intuitiveness. Brannaman had a brutal childhood under the tyrannical rule of his abusive father. He gets taken in by a kind foster family and apprentices under a mentor who teaches him everything he knows about horsemanship. Brannaman’s specific history allows him to have a unique empathy for horses, having experienced the cruelty of physical punishment to get a creature to do what the holder of the whip wants it to do, and thus he can instantly diagnose and correct horse behavioral problems as if he were Doctor Doolittle. In Buck, Meehl frames this handy cause and effect circle as self-evident, and Brannaman embraces it as he tours the Western US, helping, in his words, ‘people with horse problems and horses with people problems.’
Meehl accompanies Brannaman on one of his 40-week excursions, setting up clinics and seminars on his brand of natural horsemanship in isolated ranch towns. Seeing him at work is entrancing. With a firm, kind voice, he gets horses he’s never worked with to do whatever he wants. He is in complete control of the animals, but because he’s in total synch with them, not because of domination. Meehl incorporates older stock footage of horses being broken in every sense of the word, their bodies and their wills being crushed by blow after blow. Brannaman makes all that cruelty put into the world wholly unnecessary. He is described as the cowboy’s cowboy, but he’s the antithesis of the strong, silent type. He talks about his feelings openly. He is clearheaded about his father’s physical abuse as a purely negative experience, refusing to sugarcoat it as ‘what made him the man he is today.’ He’s what liberals would call evolved, demonstrating the same mastery of his own psyche as the horses he totes behind his truck. All of that internal control allows him to feel the slightest change in a horse and adjust accordingly, continuously reacting to its feelings and making the animal feel at ease.
Brannaman has cracked how man and horse are supposed to interact. Meehl also includes instances of where the relationship has broken down, sometimes beyond Brannaman’s expertise. In keeping with Buck’s tight framing of Brannaman’s life, there are heartbreaking anecdotes from his childhood that perfectly illustrate similar human-horse scenarios. He talks about how terrified of his foster father he was, not because the man had done anything to him, but because a young Brannaman was terrified of all men. A gift of work gloves started the thaw, but it’s easy to imagine him never getting over that earned fear. Conversely, when Brannaman goes to help a horse who’s just as skittish thanks to negligent ownership, there’s little he can do to heal mental wounds. Strikingly perfect on the outside, the stallion is violent, biting handlers and attacking cars. The sting of the failure haunts Brannaman to his next stop, as he’s shown to be a man who doesn’t believe in giving up on the creatures that he’s spent his life with, just as his foster family didn’t believe in giving up on a scarred and battered kid like him.
Those kinds of connections are all over Buck, and between Brannaman’s gentle charisma, the beauty of the animals and the vistas, and a gentle score by David Robbins with contributions from Eddie Vedder, the simplicity of the film is affecting and powerful. It’s readily apparent why someone like Robert Redford would so admire Brannaman, as does everyone who meets him. It is easy to imagine him paying back the malice he was shown as a child to the world, but he’s taken the exact opposite tack. He’s shown here to be some kind of modern-day saint, single-handedly healing an oft-fraught interspecies relationship. Buck plays out as a canonization, and a deserved one. B+
Brannaman has cracked how man and horse are supposed to interact. Meehl also includes instances of where the relationship has broken down, sometimes beyond Brannaman’s expertise. In keeping with Buck’s tight framing of Brannaman’s life, there are heartbreaking anecdotes from his childhood that perfectly illustrate similar human-horse scenarios. He talks about how terrified of his foster father he was, not because the man had done anything to him, but because a young Brannaman was terrified of all men. A gift of work gloves started the thaw, but it’s easy to imagine him never getting over that earned fear. Conversely, when Brannaman goes to help a horse who’s just as skittish thanks to negligent ownership, there’s little he can do to heal mental wounds. Strikingly perfect on the outside, the stallion is violent, biting handlers and attacking cars. The sting of the failure haunts Brannaman to his next stop, as he’s shown to be a man who doesn’t believe in giving up on the creatures that he’s spent his life with, just as his foster family didn’t believe in giving up on a scarred and battered kid like him.
Those kinds of connections are all over Buck, and between Brannaman’s gentle charisma, the beauty of the animals and the vistas, and a gentle score by David Robbins with contributions from Eddie Vedder, the simplicity of the film is affecting and powerful. It’s readily apparent why someone like Robert Redford would so admire Brannaman, as does everyone who meets him. It is easy to imagine him paying back the malice he was shown as a child to the world, but he’s taken the exact opposite tack. He’s shown here to be some kind of modern-day saint, single-handedly healing an oft-fraught interspecies relationship. Buck plays out as a canonization, and a deserved one. B+
RSS Feed