”Buck” has an astonishing way with horses

Obviously, horse people don”t need to be sold on “Buck,” the fascinating new documentary about Buck Brannaman, the horse trainer who is already a household name at horse ranches across the country.

But the most experience that your reviewer has had with horses is with the basketball game called H-O-R-S-E. And yet, I couldn”t take my eyes off this movie.

Brannaman is a 50-ish buckaroo who had a short burst of fame as a child when he and his brother were traveling the rodeo circuit as “the World”s Only Blindfolded Trick Ropers.” During the last 20 years or so, however, he”s become one of the world”s most talented horse trainers, a real-life inspiration for the book “The Horse Whisperer” and the technical adviser of Robert Redford”s film of the same name. Redford, in fact, is in the film telling an anecdote of Brannaman”s saving the day on the set of “The Horse Whisperer.”

All that is impressive, but what”s really amazing is to watch Brannaman do his work with horses. He does not operate from some mystical, huggy, mind-melding approach, nor does his subscribe to the brutal behaviorist methods of traditional horse training. Instead, he finds the sweet spot between firmness and empathy that turns wild bucking colts into calm, compliant, usable horses, and, you become convinced, makes the horses happier and healthier in the process.

Director Cindy Meehl draws clear parallels between Brannaman”s astounding touch with horses and his own back story. Young Buck was doing rope tricks on stage [and even starred in a cereal commercial] all before hitting adolescence. But, behind the scenes, his life was hellish. His father Ace, who raised the boys as a single parent after the death of Buck”s mother, was a raging alcoholic prone to beating his two boys regularly. When teachers saw the welts up and down the boy”s back, he was taken away from his father and put in a foster home.

Brannaman comes across as remarkably well-adjusted given his abusive upbringing, and the film paints him as a devoted father to a teenaged daughter following in his footsteps on the horse-show circuit. But the really compelling way that Brannaman”s background has manifested itself in his personality is his uncanny ability to understand a horse”s mind, as he masterfully plays off issues of trust and respect to the point that make a horse respond exactly how he wants it to.

“Buck” becomes something more than just about horse culture when Brannaman himself elevates horsemanship into a kind of mindful practice, the mastery of which skirts the spiritual. He is no Esalen-trained guru; he”s instead a real cowboy who speaks the plain language of the Western ranges.

What is not said but clearly demonstrated in the film is that Brannaman”s charisma, put to astonishing effect with his horses, also works on humans. Looking for an American hero who serves as an anecdote to the cartoonish, Hollywood image of the cowboy? Buck Brannaman is your man.