REPEAT AFTER ME: Buck Brannaman, the original Horse Whisperer, tries to get his point across to a pair of ponies.

EVERY REALLY good teacher is, in part, a performer. And if they're a great teacher, their mask never slips. It's because what such a teacher has to teach isn't an ordinary curriculum but a way of life. Buck Brannaman, subject of the excellent documentary Buck, spends most of the year driving through the West. He holds clinics on the gentling of out-of-control horses.

An inspiration for the novel and the movie The Horse Whisperer, Brannaman had been a rodeo performer from early childhood. Despite success as a young lariat artist (he starred in a Sugar Pops commercial), his stage-managing father beat the boy and his brother so viciously that the county had to intervene.

Apparently, Brannaman conquered the kind of rage and fear this experience must have induced. Buck is most startling in the way we see the magic happen. Temperamental, misbehaving horses aren't broken; rather, they're tamed in front of us. Brannaman speaks of avoiding "rudeness" to them.

Finally, this instructor's methods and courage are tested by a real hell-horse: a huge, brain-damaged stallion from a ranch outside of Chico, whose killer rage is like nothing you've ever seen. It's a testament to Brannaman's ability that he didn't suggest what some of the audience must have been thinking: That horse needs to be calmed down with a Winchester. Buck's encounter with this maddened creature stimulates his most philosophical words about the relations between horses and humans.

Is Buck's story too good to be true? Even Robert Redford admits he thought that was the case when meeting Buck, who was dressed up in hat, fringed chaps and spotless Western threads, during a pre-production meeting before the movie of The Horse Whisperer. The documentary respects the limits of its subject. Director Cindy Meehl polishes Brannaman but never goes against his grain. And she leaves alone the question of how Buck's brother survived the abuse, although there is a visual postscript mentioning the man. (It's understood. If someone as intense as Buck Brannaman asked for privacy, you'd probably give it to him.) Buck is quite a show about quite a teacher and quite a showman. Even the cynical have to admit this phenomenally calm and graceful figure is out to help people and animals alike.


PG; 88 min.

Opens Friday, Camera 7, Campbell

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