Butler's Cinema Scene

Buck Brannaman

“BUCK” My rating: B+ (Opens wide on July 1)

88 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

Heroes are hard to come by in this day and age. But I think we’ve got a new one.

Buck Brannaman trains horses. He is, in fact, one of the men on whom the title character of “The Horse Whisperer” was based.

His ability to read these animals, to commune with them telepathically (one good old boy rancher calls it “voodoo”), to meld minds so that no sooner does Brannaman think it than the horse responds, would be enough to make him a world-class curiosity.

But as the new documentary “Buck” illustrates, what makes Brannaman truly heroic is not his skill with horses but a tormented past which he endured, overcame and emerged from as a kind, gentle and altogether wonderful person.

Cindy Meehl‘s film follows Brannaman as he tours the country putting on horse training clinics. People bring their recalcitrant animals for four days of intensive work designed by Brannaman to put mount and rider on the same wavelength.

More than people with horse problems, Brannaman says, he deals with horses with people problems.

There’s no aw-shucks country phoniness in Brannaman’s approach. He’s a smart guy who expresses himself well. He doesn’t ramble on; he chooses his words carefully. Even so, his discourse sometimes verges on the poetic.

There’s not a smidgen of the bumpkin here. The guy’s sophisticated — heck, he drops references to Oprah.

He’s a devoted husband and father who misses his family during the many weeks each year that he’s on the road, towing a horse trailer from one clinic to the next.

He is, apparently, about as well-rounded and complete a human being as you could hope to meet. Which, given his tormented childhood, is little short of amazing.

Buck and his older brother Stormy were trained by their widowed father to be a sibling trick roping act. We see old film of the boys performing at rodeos and appearing in a cereal commercial that ran on national TV.

What the public didn’t see was a drunken father who beat his sons so unmercifully that one winter night young Buck slept outside in sub-zero weather rather than endure another whipping.

Eventually a high school athletic coach noticed the bruises on Buck’s body and the boys were placed in a foster home. There they found the nurturing they so desperately wanted. “Buck” shows Brannaman with his foster mother, a funny and deeply caring woman. The love between them is palpable.

As a young man Brannaman began studying violence-free training methods. His fame grew to the point that he was tapped by Robert Redford (who appears in this documentary) to serve as an on-set consultant for the film version of “The Horse Whisperer.”

As one of Brannaman’s colleagues notes, perhaps only a man who had endured so many torments could fully appreciate the innocent soul of an animal.

All his patience is required in a segment late in the film in which Brannaman works  with a violent stallion that viciously strikes out at any human within reach. It’s as close to a predator as a horse can get, he observes.

And it’s one of the rare instances in which his gentle methodology cannot turn around a bad situation.

“”Buck” is Meehl’s first attempt at making and documentary, and she’s done a terrific job. Of course, it helps to have as your subject a man so humbly charismatic (that sounds like a contradiction, but not in Brannaman’s case) that he rewrites our idea of what a cowboy should be.

| Robert W. Butler