Buck Brannaman is no ordinary cowboy. Behind his intractable face -- camouflaged under a plain, unassuming fedora -- the cowboy, jaw pinched, barely musters enough courage to speak. Yet hordes of eager pupils, under strained wallets (saving all year long) saddle on top of various colts, studs, and young equines and await Buck's every word.
Buck is a real-life horse-whisperer. In mere minutes, he can tame the most skeptical and wild equine into a trustworthy partner. A spastic and stumbling horse, hind legs erratic and head on a continuous swivel, morphs into posture; the horse begins to take on balletic grace. His methods seemingly telekinetic, Buck forgoes traditionally cruel contraptions and abusive lashing, enshrining a relationship between instructor and instructed, human and horse alike.
The Sundance Audience Award Winning documentary simply titled Buck travels America's plains -- from North Carolina to Maine and westward -- alongside the stoic cowboy over a nine-month long caravan journey. Director Cindy Meehl primarily chronicles Buck's work routine: to, from, and during his four-day long seminars on 'how to break a horse.'
Buck's sage-like tranquility took years to refine, as he explains. The formerly tight-lipped Montanan shares all. Nine-year-old Buck and his elder brother, both rope-trick prodigies, entertained rodeo and television audiences after the death of their mother, performing an act in the vaquero Western tradition. However, it wasn't until Buck's concerned gym teacher stripped the terrified, soft-spoken boy in the locker room that Buck's raw, welted back revealed the nightly physical abuse administered by his alcoholic stage-father. In a surreptitious nighttime abduction (overseen by the town sheriff), Buck was whisked away to a loving foster family of twenty plus, where he learned through disciplined work how to live a Midwestern life and fend for himself. As Buck's stepfather once said, 'You may not amount to much in life, but if you can shoe a horse, you'll never go hungry.'
What makes Buck so engaging, so richly American -- and ultimately humane -- is not the story but the connection both the subject and filmmaker have with the land and the multitudes who populate it. Buck's life work derives from a torturous rearing -- an understanding that in order to synchronize human and horse and avoid contention, one has to treat his animal firmly but fairly.. He knows what it's like to be scared for his life. Sensitivity to fear guides his every move inside the round pen and out.
Without deifying, Meehl justly portrays a good man and his family, particularly Buck's relationship with his teenage daughter Reata, a natural on horseback and with a rope. She joins her father midway through the picture. Along with wife Mary, Reata is witness to an oddity. At the film's climax, Buck struggles and ultimately fails to pacify a psychologically unstable and malicious stallion. When Buck plays self-effacing philosopher, "Your horse is a mirror to your soul, and sometimes you may not like what you see. Sometimes, you will," the film provides visual evidence.
Once the first credit hits, Buck proves to be one of those rare films that not only satisfies but effects change in the viewer -- provoking a humble desire to live a more dignified life.
