John Wayne wouldn’t recognize the cowboys in “Sweetgrass.”
First of all, they’re herding sheep, not cattle. They carry high-powered rifles, cameras and walkie-talkies.
And one nearly comes to tears complaining in a profanity-filled call to Mother about the punishing drive across Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains.
Husband-wife Harvard anthropologists Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash spent three years with a family of sheepherders.
From the 200 hours of footage they shot emerges the documentary, which unspooled at the 2009 New York Film Festival and is now at Film Forum.
It starts on a farm, where sheep are born and shorn and the only sounds we hear come from machines and sheep.
The focus goes from animals to cowboys when “Sweetgrass” progresses into the rugged mountains as 3,000 sheep are driven to summer pasture.
The drive is a now-dying ritual dating back to the 19th century. (This family has called it a day.)
The filmmakers wisely avoid the temptation to be cutesy (remember that penguin movie?) and sentimental.
Castaing-Taylor’s lensing — from sheep staring into a camera to panoramic views of the gorgeous landscape — is pleasing to the eye.