Movie Review: 'Sweetgrass'

"Sweetgrass" is an unexpectedly intoxicating documentary, unexpected because it blends high artistic standards with the grueling reality of one of the toughest, most exhausting of work environments. For though the area of southern Montana where "Sweetgrass" is shot is a visually stunning locale, running a sheep ranch in general and caring for enormous flocks during their months of summer pasture in particular turns out to be a grueling, intensely physical existence grounded in the unforgiving rhythms of the natural world. Made by filmmakers and anthropologists Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, "Sweetgrass" consciously echoes the celebrated 1925 silent documentary "Grass," a record made by the future "King Kong" duo of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack of a staggering annual migration by Bakhtiari sheep herdsmen in what was then Persia. Though it's not a silent film -- thousands of baa-ing sheep wouldn't allow for that -- "Sweetgrass" does without interviews and without voice-overs. The only human voices heard are those captured in random snatches of conversation, like one of the ranch hands joking about why a cowboy's brain would be worth millions on the open market: "It's never been used." Made as well in the restrained tradition of Frederick Wiseman, "Sweetgrass" is intent on doing no more than observing, on having as unobtrusive a presence as possible in the world it is recording. But that world turns out to be as compelling as the circumstances under which the film came to be made...read more