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Sweetgrass Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: (Unrated) by Cinema Guild Directed by: Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor Runtime: 1 hour 45 minutes Cast: Sgt. John Sweet, John Ahern, Pat Connolly, Mark Miller Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

"I am the last guy to do this and someone ought to make a film about it." That's what rancher Lawrence Allested said to Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash in 2001 about his family's practice of herding their sheep long distances up a Montana mountain range for summer pasture. Castaing-Taylor and Barabash—a husband and wife team, both filmmakers and anthropologists, now headquartered at Harvard—agreed and over the last decade have made nine films about the final years of sheepherding on the Allested Ranch. Most of these films will undoubtedly serve the academy well for many years to come. But one of them, Sweetgrass (now available on DVD), has been edited and released for general audiences. And it is sublime, a poetic elegy to the American West and the way we once were.

Like the lilting Norwegian accent that still marks their speech, the Allested family still utilizes a permit to graze sheep in Montana's Absaroka-Beartooth wilderness that has been passed down through several generations. Every year, the family and their hired hands have goaded their herd up the mountains, fording streams, navigating rock slides, fending off bears. The practice is as arduous as the terrain is beautiful, and this push provides the surprisingly dramatic and comedic heart of Sweetgrass. It's surprising because the drama of the documentary sneaks up on you. The filmmakers use the lightest of touches, allowing the warp of and woof of life on the hoof—animal and human—to unfold before you without narration.

On the job

The comedy is perhaps less sneaky, given that it wears a bell around its neck. The sheep are the real stars of the show and one imagines that unlike their stoic Norwegian-American caretakers, they would all happily, if haphazardly, crowd into the spotlight without much prodding. It's perhaps a testament to the talents of animators and sound engineers that in the first several minutes of Sweetgrass I couldn't get over how the look and sound of the sheep—creatures I've never observed in such large numbers—so closely resembled Hollywood's depictions. I wouldn't have blinked if Babe had made her way through the crowd at some point and struck up a conversation with a black-faced lamb.

The fact that probably most people who see this movie are more familiar with depictions of sheep on brightly colored screens than the real things is not unrelated to the passing away of the Allesteds' way of life. But there is no sermon here. In fact, there aren't many words at all. The phrase "chewing the cud" took on renewed life for me in these opening moments of the film as the camera opened its eye on the grazing sheep, content if a bit skittish. They really are such alert, malleable creatures, able to be herded by a couple of industrious dogs and some whooping. I almost laughed out loud watching the animals watch me. I suppose they were actually watching the (crouching) cameraman, but the effect was personal when one sheep stopped mid-chew to stare in concerned bewilderment at the camera. Ready for her close-up, indeed.

A herder's best friend

But the words do come. A classic rock station plays over the din while workers sheer sheep, twisting limber appendages and pinning necks the way a hurried and ham-fisted masseuse might work out your kinks on an assembly line, sending you dazed out into the sunshine, not sure if you're better or worse off for the favor. The people that populate Sweetgrass are as unassuming and skilled, popping jokes at their own expense while tending to newborn lambs. There is a kind of crudeness here, a matter-of-fact quality to life and death that allows workers to sling around newborn lambs like sides of (dead) meat. But the effort is in a messy attempt to match orphans with sheep that have just given birth, dousing the orphans in the mother's birth fluid in order to convince her to adopt this lamb as her own so that it will survive. And in the gruffness, we see benevolence.

By the time the herd is ready to start trailing up the mountain, winter has given way to spring has given way to summer and hired hands John Ahern and Pat Connolly are charged with their care. Ahern is the wizened veteran of this pair, with kind eyes that often seem a bit bemused by Connolly's youthful impatience and perhaps also by the camera. Neither of the men say much to each other (they vent their frustration with the sheep in bursts of colorful cursing often enough), but papers could be written about the elliptical qualities of their communication, often repeating the same phrases or mundane observations for an occasional break in the silence. Or rather, for a break in the bleating.

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