Sweetgrass (Friday, January 8, 2010) (1)

Sweetgrass is a small documentary about sheep herders (shepherds, I guess) who take their sheep up to the mountains in Montana's Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, public land in South-Central Montana near Yellowstone National Park. It is basically the same people who were in Brokeback Mountain - but with no gay sex and with a bigger crew of cowboys. The film follows them for about a year (though it was apparently filmed over the course of three years, from 2001-2003) from a late winter snow, when the sheep are sheared of their winter fleece, to the summer in the mountains and then again to the cold of autumn.

We follow a group of about ten cowboys (and a few cowgirls) on their trips into the back-country and see how they interact with one another and with the animals. One old cowboy, who seems to be at least the spiritual leader, if not the actual boss, is the central player in the story as he gives bits of context as the movie goes along.

The style of the film is very straight-forward. There is no narration and no explanation of what is going (until at least the very end, when there are a few titles that come on to explain grand-scale shepherding in the American West and how public lands are used for private business). We see a rather point-of-view camera showing what the sheep are seeing at their level, or what the cowboys are seeing on their horses. The context of each scene is pretty self-evident, however, there is nothing framing the story, so it is rather structureless. There is a sense that things are happening in chronological order, but this is not explicit, so scenes are rather interchangeable, if not entirely haphazard.

The film is nothing if not brutally honest and frank, though, and we see everything these cowboys and sheep go through, including some rather gross things. There is an elaborate scene showing the birthing of lambs and the lengths the cowboys have to go to to make sure all the babies have a mother. One orphaned lamb is curiously put into what looks like a little lamb sweater. Then the shepherd tells us that this is because he has to have the smell of another lamb so an adoptive mother will feed him. It turns out the 'sweater' is actually the skin of a dead lamb from that same mother sheep. Gross.

Also totally genuine (and hilarious) are the portrayals of the cowboys, who are rough, angry, lonely and sometimes hilariously bawdy and crude. One shepherd launches into a five-minute diatribe at the sheep (as he sits alone on horseback while wearing a microphone) calling them 'sour cunts,' 'goddamn motherfuckers' and 'little fucking pieces of shit'. It's hilarious and goes on and on (and on) with his tantrum.

At another time, two cowboys sit by a campfire at night discussing what kind of animal it is that is sneaking into their camp at night and stealing sheep. One says, 'It could be a bear - or worse, a wolverine.' The other responds very slowly, 'Well... you know... there's only one thing worse than a bear... and that's a wol-verine'. This is the level of most of the dialogue in the film. That is, most of the human dialogue. There is a ton of sheep dialogue. Baaaaaah. Baaaaaaaah. Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Stars: 2.5 of 4