Butler's Cinema Scene

Amber Havard, Rob Morgan

“BULL” My rating: B 

105 minutes | No MPAA rating

Fourteen-year-old Kris (Amber Havard) acts out.   A lot.

With her single mom in prison, Kris radiates abandonment and anger and quiet defiance.  She hangs with the older kids in her small town outside Houston, drinks and smokes.  And when she realizes that her neighbor Abe (Rob Morgan) spends most of his weekends on the road, she invites the other kids to party in his house, leaving the place a shambles.

After Abe returns to a trashed home, Kris’ grandma convinces the angry victim to not press charges. Instead the sullen teen will more or less become Abe’s slave, cleaning up the mess she made.

That’s how Kris learns that Abe is a former champion bull rider with countless mended bones and a drawer full of painkillers.  But he still makes a living on the rodeo circuit as a clown whose acrobatic antics keep angry bulls from stomping or goring their thrown riders.

To Kris this all looks like an exciting way of escaping her rut. There’s no reason why a girl can’t be a bull rider, right?

Most filmmakers would turn this plot into a heart-warming tale of forgiveness and renewed hope, a rodeo version of “The Karate Kid.”  Throw into the mix issues of race — Abe is black and Kris is white — and you can see “uplift” written all over it.

But writer/director Annie Silverstein isn’t having any of that crap. Her characters are too damaged for nice tidy resolutions and happy endings. Which somehow makes “Bull” all the more affecting.

Amber Havard

Shot almost exclusively with handheld cameras that provide an intense intimacy, “Bull” doesn’t do much explaining.  Both Abe and Kris are individuals of few words.  They internalize their roiling emotions…at least until they explode into antisocial and self-destructive behavior. What we know of them we know by watching; the characters aren’t going to open up to us.

But this sort of emotional distance has its own upside, forcing the viewer to  pay attention to little things, small gestures. If “Bull” lacks a big payoff, it’s because Silverstein doesn’t realistically expect Abe and Kris to turn their lives around…at least not in the limited time frame the film offers.

Along the way “Bull” delivers some marvelous stuff.  Its depiction of the small world of African American rodeo professionals is rich and detailed. And Morgan — a veteran utility actor (“Stranger Things,” “This Is Us,” “The Last Black Man in San Francisco”) here getting a rare leading role — apparently put his life on the line to portray Abe. The scenes of him dodging furious bulls in the arena do not appear to have been faked…certainly this film didn’t have a budget for expensive FX.

| Robert W. Butler