Buck Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		2.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

Buck Blu-ray Movie Review

Zen and the Art of Natural Horsemanship

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater March 1, 2012

Buck Brannaman is a cowboy's cowboy, lean as a fencepost, stoic as a sunrise. When he surveys the landscape, the far-away look in his eyes gives the illusion that he's peering to the very ends of the earth. He's practically an archetype for a breed of western man that has almost entirely died out--the self-sufficient, salt-of-the-earth, in-touch-with-the-natural-world horseman. Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse Whisperer, has called Brannaman "the Zen master of the horse world," and the label certainly fits. He's calm and contemplative and under-control; you get the feeling it would take an awful lot to rile him up. At the same time, you also get the immediate sense that his poise and inner-balance were hard-won, born out of the personal hardships of a troubled early life. He's an old soul.

In Buck, fashion designer-turned-documentarian Cindy Meehl peers back into that old soul's past to discover how Brannaman came to be the man he is today, a real-life horse whisperer who's made it his mission to heal emotionally wounded horses and teach their human masters to use gentle firmness instead of fear and abuse. It's a doggedly authentic film that's inspirational without being saccharine, and despite its seemingly rather niche subject matter, it appeals to a much broader audience than just rodeo fans and armchair cowpokes.

Buck

Brannaman is a practitioner of what's now known as "natural horsemanship," a philosophy of training that avoids physical punishment and seeks to foster a more intuitive, loving connection between horse and human. It stands against everything implied by the long-held previous notion of "breaking" a horse--that is, subjecting it to violence and lowering its spirits, literally beating the animal into submission. Buck knows firsthand the horrors of abuse. As a child, he was in the cowboy world's version of showbiz, performing with his brother Smokie as trick-ropers at rodeos. They even appeared on a few TV commercials and variety shows. When they failed to perform to the level of perfection expected by their father, however, he would beat them senseless. It got worse when their mother--their only protector--passed away. Their widowed dad became a raging drunk who would wake his kids up in the middle of the night to subject them to long disciplinary tirades, whipping them savagely if they even looked up from the kitchen table.

In one of the film's most harrowing stories, Buck recalls running outside into a snowy, negative-20-degree Montanan winter evening to escape his dad's wrath, shivering for hours inside a hay-filled 55-gallon drum that been turned into a makeshift doghouse. Luckily, the state removed him and his brother from his father's custody and placed them in a loving foster home, where Buck's new parents--Betsy and Forrest Shirley--patiently instilled in him a sense of purpose and self-worth. (Betsy is a real hoot; stick around for the credits, when she retells Buck's favorite joke. I won't spoil it for you.) Eventually, Buck fell under the tutelage of famed horse trainer Ray Hunt, who himself was a disciple of the father of natural horsemanship, Tom Dorrance. They've been humorously described, respectively, as the Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan, and Yoda of horse training.

The Force is most certainly strong with this one. In the 1980s, Buck overcame his natural shyness and began holding clinics of his own, helping horse owners better relate to their animals. He's been at it for the last three decades, criss-crossing the country for 40 weeks out of every year, from Oregon to Maine and back to his home in Wyoming. The documentary spends much of its short, 88-minute runtime at a few of these seminars, where we get a glimpse at some of Buck's wonderworking methods. "Most of us have a bag of tricks," says a fellow trainer, "but Buck has an arsenal." Another levels this high praise: "God had him in mind when he made a cowboy." The control Buck has over horses is simply astounding, but control is perhaps too harsh a word. His whole approach is based on understanding the animal's natural instincts and working with them, rather than trying to suppress them. It's almost like he develops a psychic connection with the horse; they work together seemingly effortlessly in unison. We never see him doing any actual whispering, but Buck was in fact the inspiration for The Horse Whisperer, and he was also recruited by Robert Redford to serve as an "equine advisor" for the film adaptation. Redford appears here to express his admiration for Buck--whom he calls "the real deal"--and he relates how Brannaman was instrumental in the shooting of a key scene, where in fifteen minutes he got a horse to perform a trick that the Hollywood trainers failed at for eight hours.

Buck seems merely bemused by the moviemaking stuff, and he's certainly no fame-seeker. He's just a humble dude who wants to help. Understandably, he has an natural affinity for horses that have been neglected or abused. "A lot of times," he says, "rather than helping people with horse problems, I'm helping horses with people problems." As Buck sees it, the horse is "a mirror to your soul, and sometimes you might not like what you see in the mirror." In other words, if a horse is rebellious and angry and willful, it probably says a lot about the owner and how he or she treats the animal. In many cases, Buck can help turn these sorts of situations around, but there comes a point when not much can be done for a horse that's been systematically mistreated. The documentary's dramatic centerpiece is an encounter with a skittish bronco that bites one of Buck's assistants on the head and is simply too aggressive--too far gone--to be tamed. He'll have to be put down. What director Cindy Meehl subtly implies here is that this is the direction Buck's Brannaman's own life could've gone if his foster parents hadn't so compassionately intervened in his emotional development.

Buck Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Like most documentaries nowadays, Buck was produced on high definition digital video, but I couldn't help but wish the doc had been shot on film, which might've given the image a gritty authenticity that would've jived a bit better with the subject matter. As it stands, the 1080p/AVC encode is very video-ish, somewhat flat and lacking texture. But it is what it is. Clarity isn't the greatest, and it looks to me like some of the footage was actually shot in standard definition. (Though most of the "talking head" interviews are quite sharp, and definitely in HD.) Color is strictly realistic--it hasn't been stylized in any way--and though the image isn't especially vibrant or punchy, the picture rests on a bedrock of solid black levels. The usual shot-on-low- budget-video quirks are here--washed out highlights, noise in darker scenes, some slight banding occasionally in the color gradient of the sky, mild aliasing here and there, infrequent chromatic aberrations--but there's nothing outright distracting. This sure ain't eye candy, but it is a modest, functional Blu-ray presentation.

Buck Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Buck canters onto Blu-ray with a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track that does what it needs to do and not much more. Since the sound was recorded on location and primarily outdoors you can't expect it to be perfect--there's some light muffling from time to time, and occasionally the dialogue a bit low compared to other noises--but the mix is highly listenable, with no genuinely distracting audio quirks. There's some light environmental ambience in the rear channels, but the surrounds are primarily used to spread out David Robbin's score, which trots between slide guitar and strings. It sounds reasonably full, but the music is never potted especially loud. The emphasis is on the interviewees' voices, which are generally understood easily. For those that might need or want them, the disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles.

Buck Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary: Director Cindy Meehl and producer Julie Bowman sit down with Buck Brannaman for an unsurprisingly genial chat about the shooting of the film. I could listen to Buck talk all day--dude is seriously soothing.
• Deleted Scenes (1080p): Includes 11 deleted scenes, amounting to about 25-minutes of extra footage.
• Trailer (1080p, 2:33)

Buck Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As a country boy who emigrated to the city, Buck tickles the part of my brain that subconsciously yearns for fresh hay and open sky. It's a straightforward, honest documentary about overcoming hardships, and it's touching without dipping into aw-shucks naiveté or sappiness. Color me pleasantly surprised. Horse lovers will definitely want to add this disc to their collections, but even those who aren't equine aficionados might want to check out the film for its inspirational, life-affirming message.