Features > Movie Reviews > Buck…

Based on a novel by Nicholas Evans, it was the story of a modern-day cowboy, a horse trainer who didn’t believe in “breaking” horses, but instead earned their trust.

Well, Evans acknowledged three real life models for the character he’d spent time with while researching the book: veterans Tom Dorrance and Ray Hunt and their younger protégé, Buck Brannaman. The latter also worked as a consultant and stunt double on the film.

Turns out Buck (short for Buckshot) is a more interesting character than Tom Booker, the perfect specimen of manhood Evans wrote about and Robert Redford played.

He doesn’t look like Redford of course – Sam Shepard might be close to it. He’s a slim, soft spoken fellow with thin lips and (now anyways) grey hair. Redford got one thing right: he’s laconic, but in one of those paradoxes that life throws up, he makes his living teaching horsemanship, which means having a microphone slung under his nose for a good part of the year.

When he’s not in the corral, he’s mostly driving to his next gig; he spends nine months of the year on the road, criss-crossing the United States with only his horse for company. Which seems to be how he likes it even though he also appears to be a loving husband and father (his daughter travels with him in the holidays some times).

Brannaman’s approach to horse training isn’t all carrot and no stick, but he uses the latter lightly, just a light touch on the hind-quarters. He’ll hold a halter firmly, but he doesn’t want to get into a tug of war situation with the animal… If you give a little, he says, the horse will learn to give in return. It works too. Often he seems not to have to do anything – whatever wavelength horses operate on, Buck seems to have tuned right into it.

When he’s presented with a problem horse, he often finds that it’s actually a horse with a people problems at the root of it all; a rider or an owner who has imposed his or her own neuroses on the nag… In which case he’s equally frank, but not unkind, with his two-legged client.

You don’t have to be “horsey” to find this absorbing (I like cowboy movies, but that’s about as far as I go down that trail). Of course, if you are, this movie is a must-see. But I’d recommend it to anyone interested in human psychology too. Turns out this remarkably sensitive man comes from a brutal background: his mom died when he was still young, and his father was beyond stern, a showbiz dad who would haul off on Buck and his brother if they flunked the rope tricks they performed on the Western rodeo circuit from the age of three upwards.

The first film directed by fashion designer Cindy Meehl, Buck is pretty to look at and free of gimmickry, but it’s the way Meehl measures out Brannaman’s personal story and ties it to his philosophy that makes it so effective. Like her subject, she knows just how much to give without letting the rope slip out of her hands.