‘Buck’ — a cowboy straight from God

People tend to stare at Brannaman wherever he goes, not because of his get-up. He dresses like a working cowboy most days; it’s more because of what he knows. Brannaman, who has been riding since before he could reach the stirrups, uses a mystical empathy to calm horses, forgoing the casual violence that is so much a part of horse breaking.

For three decades in clinics all over the country, Brannaman, 49, has taught that riding a horse is like dancing, a combination of wooing, leading and mutual respect. A cult figure among both the horsey set and working cowboys, he is about to reach a much wider audience courtesy of the 88-minute documentary distributed by IFC’s Sundance Selects from first-time director Cindy Meehl. The movie may gallop along on four legs, but it is not about horses so much as the creatures who saddle them.

Brannaman, who lives on a ranch in Sheridan, Wyo., is an advocate of so-called natural horsemanship, a Zen figure in boots who is interested less in breaking horses than in enabling them to find a place amid the expectations and requirements of humans.

“Like a lot of people I was very skeptical at first,” Meehl said in a phone call about how she came to make her first film. “For most horse people, what he was talking about was such a foreign concept, and then you saw what he could do with the horses that people brought him. Nobody talks to you like Buck, nobody rides like Buck, and nobody teaches like Buck.”

She added, “He empowers people to do things that they never thought they could do, like make a film, for instance.”

Brannaman, a student of Tom Dorrance and Ray Hunt, early advocates for laying down the crop, spent much of his early life being whipped in the manner of a horse by an abusive, alcoholic father. He escaped that tyranny on the back of a horse, learning to ride at a level that few achieve. Even those who know little of horse culture will recognize the poetics of his riding. Brannaman can do anything on a horse — “God had him in mind when he made a cowboy,” said Gary Myers, a ranch owner who appears in the film — and the camera revels in his ability, with jaw-dropping slow-motion interludes.

Brannaman doesn’t get what all the fuss is about: “I’ve seen the movie maybe 15 times, and I never notice myself. I’m always looking at my horse and what he’s doing.”

Brannaman still spends much of the year driving a truck and trailer to put on four-day clinics, priced low so that he gets all kinds of people and horses to work with. And once the movie splash dies down, he will happily get back in that saddle.

“In a few months the excitement of all this will be done, and I will go back to being me,” he said over coffee after dinner. “I am not one bit delusional about that.”

At a clinic in the film, a woman shows up with a buck-wild stud horse that had been deprived of oxygen during a troubled birth and through lack of training has morphed into a menace to everyone who comes near him. An experienced cowboy trying to get a blanket on him is even bitten on the head. Brannaman reminds people at the clinic that it is not the horse’s fault that he can’t seem to live in this world.

“All your horses are a mirror to your soul,” he said. “And sometimes you might not like what you see in the mirror.”

It becomes clear that the horse is beyond salvation, beyond the reach of Brannaman, and will have to be put down. But first the horse has to be put in a trailer. Rather than corner the doomed animal and shove him in by force, Brannaman waits him out until the horse steps onto the trailer of its own accord. It is an elegiac, endlessly sad scene, one that lingers. A woman at the clinic asks why he took so much time and patience on a horse with no future.

He answers, “To have contempt for the horse never would even occur to me.”