Sweetgrass

'SWEETGRASS': Two and a Half Stars (Out of Five)

Another of the more critically acclaimed documentaries from last year, this one tells the story of modern day cowboys herding sheep one last time through the Absaroka Beartooth mountain range in Montana in the summer of 2003. It's directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor (although uncredited), a Harvard anthropologist, and llisa Barbash (his wife) and produced by Barbash. The film has no music or narration and appears to be somewhat randomly edited together with no real story or message to deliver. It's extremely slow paced and lacking any kind of focus.

The film follows a family of sheepherders as they make their final summer herd through the mountains of Sweet Grass County. It was filmed in 2001 to 2003 at a time when this was still a way of life for some. There's very little dialogue and what there is contains a lot of vulgar language. The film is not rated but would be rated R due to the extreme amount of F words used throughout. We see the herders at their grimmest and most unlikeable as they toss the sheep around and constantly curse them out.

The film is, as I mentioned, very slow and quite dull for almost it's entirety. The scenery is beautiful though and the video is somewhat intimate. It often feels like the herders don't even know they're being filmed as they go about their daily business. It's definitely not a film for everyone and will only please a select audience but if you're into honest documentaries with no other BS you'll probably enjoy it.

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Sweetgrass is a documentary, literally: a document of a particular place, time and events. There's no narration, no host or guide, and seemingly no attempt to edit the footage to tell a story. Each scene appears to be chosen because it illuminates the subject, rather than for drama.

The camera records a group of sheep farmers and herders preparing a flock and getting them across the mountains. The focus is on everyday details of animal tending and herding, straightforward and unsentimental. The people working with the sheep seem mostly unconscious of the cameras, just going about their business. It's like seeing into another life.

Of course, it's another life that's centered around sheep. If that sounds boring, this probably isn't the film for you, because that's all there is to it, and it's slow-paced. It's very different from Discovery Channel style documentaries that try to teach and entertain. There's no Mike Rowe here to relate everything he's doing to you so that you can understand what's going on.

But there's something to be said for just watching things happen.

The movie isn't trying to reach out and explain itself to you, and that enables it to draw you in, if you're willing to go along for the ride.

At one point in this wonderful work, the camera is high in the Montana Beartooths above the cowboys with their 3000 sheep coming up the mountain for some good-weather grazing. The woolies are getting to be all over the place and you see a lone cowboy in the saddle with the help of a few sheepdogs corraling the herd purely by the way he moves his horse around and by the calls he makes. Gracefully and neatly he tightens up the herd and turns it in the direction he wants the little bleaters to go. He creates a fence invisible 'round his woolies.

It's that kind of skill, no, art that is so evident in these guys: keeping order in the herd, whittling rough branches for the spines of their tents, sleeping with one ear open for sounds of bear and wolverine, sharpshooting in the night aided only by lamp. These guys do it all and well. They can also midwife a ewe in the crisis of giving birth, find an udder for an orphaned lamb and cleanly, expertly fleece these critters when the wool is heavy.

These cowboys never get rich inspite of a bagful of skills and talents that leave the viewer in respectful admiration. Watching the travail of these guys makes you realize you have never in your life known the true meaning of "hard work."

This is a documentary without any taped-on background music and without any warm-toned narrator telling you what you're seeing. Not even Morgan Freeman. The footage tells the story without extraneous aids. The absence of other noise is welcome. This piece is awesome but it's also funny, not just in the humanity of the cowboys. There's some real comic talent among those woolies, too. Jim Smith

A documentary on the life of Montana sheepherders, "Sweetgrass" looks for all the world as if it had been strung together from a series of "Brokeback Mountain" outtakes. I guess that's inevitable given the subject matter and setting, but this seems almost like a nonfiction version of that movie - minus the movie stars and gay romance, that is (and it's not as beautifully filmed).

What most distinguishes "Sweetgrass" from other documentaries is that there is no voice-over narration to explain or analyze what's going on. And the individuals who appear in the film are every bit as taciturn and tight-lipped as one would expect the people in this particular setting to be. The movie simply chronicles the day-to-day task of raising, herding and shearing sheep without feeling the need to comment on what it's showing us. The drawback is that we never get to know much about the rugged men and women involved in the business, what makes them tick (indeed, they talk to their animals more than they do each other). At some point, however, we do begin to understand the toll all this loneliness, physical exertion and exposure to the elements begins to take on the people who do this job.

The result is an admittedly repetitive and frequently tedious exercise in filmmaking that also casts a strangely hypnotic spell over its audience. Perhaps it's the fact that movies rarely just show us people working at their professions that makes this film compelling in its uniqueness. And the image of hundreds of sheep crowding down the main street of town on their way to pasture is bound to stick with you despite any doubts you might have as to whether they are truly fit subjects for a full-length feature.

Though at the time it seemed a bit slow in parts, I thoroughly am reliving wonderful moments in this film. It is simply about a season of sheep herding. Very little dialog - no fill-in music or annoying narration. Just sheep, and their ranchers. The scenery is beautiful. I would love to see this movie on a huge screen with HD to truly enjoy the Montana mountains. But it is grand. There are a few squeamish moments - but it's all in the life cycle of a sheep. We get to share in the boredom, excitement, and frustration of the sheep herders in a very personal way that I'm sure has never been shown before. It is a jewel of a movie and definitely worth the time if you have a chance to see it.