Sadly, in the same way the blades of grass are ravaged by the wind, the film's American-mythic subject matter is besieged by modernity: We learn that this will be the final trail to pasture for these hired hands and the farmers who employ them. It is never revealed why this is the final trail but fiscal woe is assumed. Yet, neither gloom nor dread presides over the tone of Castaing-Taylor and Barbash's work. On the contrary: The screen is constantly filled with movement and life, even when it is as minute as an old trailhand mumbling a few lines of an old cowboy tune.
But even before we learn of the finality of the herders' employment, we witness moments where it is clear that all of these 'cowboys' are not as strong-jawed as Thomas Dunson leading his men on a treacherous cattle drive in Red River. In the film's most memorable scene, a young herder calls his mother on a cellphone from the top of a hill. 'I'd rather enjoy these mountains than hate'em' he sobs, putting into glaring relief the amount of stress John Wayne might have been carrying on those hunched shoulders. Nevertheless, the American cowboy sulking over his hardships rather than drowning them in a lake of whiskey is an oddly devastating sight to behold.
And the film, bereft of narration, music or more than a couple title screens, often plays as a collection of such sights. If the last few years have seen a more popular shift towards subjective documentary filmmaking, Sweetgrass comes as a deep breath of cool mountain air in its uncluttered, uncompromising objectivity. We never hear a word about the death of the American West or the changing face of agricultural business for a second of Sweetgrass' 101 minutes but it feels implicit in its covertly audacious iconoclasm. To put it simply: The imagery speaks louder than those filming it.
If the disheartened cowboy was the film's nod towards modernity, it has its most natural moment in the discovery of a sheep carcass, torn and bloodied. Among Castaing-Taylor and Barbash's hypnotic long-takes of sheering and the arduous trail, the aftermath of a rogue bear attack acts as a jolting reminder of a vibrant and violent wilderness that still lives among the peaks and ridges; a world that might have been tamed in Westerns by John Ford and Howard Hawks but remains unbridled and dangerous. Using footage compiled over three year, Castaing-Taylor and Barbash's film never builds these themes but that would seem to be the point. It is a testament to Sweetgrass and the American West it depicts that even in its twilight it remains, essentially, an enigma.
