“Sweetgrass”: Spectacular elegy for a dying West

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:05:00 +0000

We tend to mythologize certain ultra-masculine occupations as imbued with some essential American ethos: long-haul trucker, big-city police detective, oil-rig wildcatter. But none of those is as redolent of the lost, last frontier as sheepherding in the Mountain West, a job that isn't much different today than it was 100 years ago. At least, until recently it wasn't much different.

I shouldn't issue spoilers even for an essentially non-narrative film like Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's spectacular documentary "Sweetgrass," partly because the story it does tell -- in amazing images that will stick with you for a lifetime -- has all the subtle resonance of Hemingway's best short stories. Let's just say that this European anthropologist-filmmaker couple, working in the strict cinéma-vérité tradition of Frederick Wiseman -- no narration, no talking-head interviews, a bare minimum of on-screen information -- have captured the century-old culture of Montana sheepherding in its last stages.

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“Sweetgrass”: Spectacular elegy for a dying West