Unbranded | Little White Lies

Unbrand­ed

20 Nov 2015 / Released: 27 Nov 2015

Cowboys on horseback in a mountainous landscape at sunset.
Cowboys on horseback in a mountainous landscape at sunset.
4

Anticipation.

Wild wild horses, couldn’t drag me away.

2

Enjoyment.

Like five hours of Discovery Channel shoehorned into a two-hour movie.

2

In Retrospect.

The gift shop DVD from an exciting horse farm.

Beau­ti­ful­ly shot vis­tas are all that this doc on mod­ern cat­tle dri­ving has to offer, and it isn’t enough.

Ben Mas­ters, Ben Thamer, Jon­ny Fitzsi­mons and Thomas Glover are the young men in the doc­u­men­tary Unbrand­ed, who tell usproud­ly they will trav­el a pack of wild mus­tangs 3,000 miles from Mex­i­co to the Cana­di­an bor­der. They’ll take these adopt­ed hors­es through Texas, Ari­zona, Ida­ho and Mon­tana: moun­tains, deserts, canyons – gnarly coun­try.” But what they don’t quite tell us is why.

In a sense, it’s self-explana­to­ry. The Amer­i­can fron­tiers­man has always had a kin­ship with the horse, a sub­text in count­less west­erns, occa­sion­al­ly fore­ground­ed in some­thing like Hidal­go or The Mis­fits. The boys have just grad­u­at­ed from Texas A&M, and they want an adven­ture and a chal­lenge before they set­tle down to jobs and marriage.

Or, as George Mal­lo­ry would have it, because it’s there. But see­ing as they don’t explic­it­ly state a rea­son, and the clos­est they get is, there’s not much room out there for them and there’s not much room out there for us,” one won­ders what a Wern­er Her­zog would have found in this mate­r­i­al – the void of man’s exis­tence, locked in a trag­ic affin­i­ty with orphaned beasts against a land­scape of loom­ing death. To which a cow­boy can only deter­mine – as Jon­ny Fitzsim­mons does – that he’s, Born with a G on one foot and an O on the other.”

The direc­tor of Unbrand­ed is Phillip Baribeau, who unfor­tu­nate­ly does not have such a sense of the epic or poet­ic, and instead gives us the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel ver­sion. The out­door spir­it of the adven­tur­ers is inspir­ing, and there are vis­cer­al moments of pain, like when hors­es get stuck with cac­ti or stum­ble and roll down hills.

There are moments of quirk and cama­raderie, like when the boys con­fess that long stretch­es of rid­ing on horse­back are bor­ing and they ride while read­ing paper­backs like Fifty Shades of Grey’. And there is the auda­cious­ness of the jour­ney, such as pass­ing through the Grand Canyon via thin, windy ledges – If there’s a loose rock, we’re dead.” Very lit­tle of this, how­ev­er, is cap­tured by Baribeau with a sense of majesty – instead, there are gener­ic slo-mo shots of spurs and horse­shoes, and talk­ing heads aplent­ly but few shots that make clear exact­ly how many ani­mals the gang is trans­port­ing. The tele­vi­su­al pac­ing is summed up by dec­la­ra­tions like, We did it! Took us three days!” after one day­light scene that lasts bare­ly a minute.

We learn fas­ci­nat­ing facts about the mus­tang being not a breed so much as a pet name, the over­pop­u­la­tion of them in the Amer­i­can West, the Bureau of Land Management’s attempt to con­trol their growth while respect­ing their legal­ly pro­tect­ed sta­tus and the effect of their over­graz­ing on com­mer­cial live­stock. (“That land seems unlim­it­ed when you dri­ve across it, but it is lim­it­ed.”) Nar­ra­tive­ly, though, the film cuts between expert debate on scarci­ty of resources and the friend­ship of the fresh-faced trav­el­ling horse­men, nev­er syn­the­sis­ing the dif­fer­ing themes of appro­pri­ate man­age­ment lev­els of ani­mals, the chal­lenge of train­ing them and the jour­ney of a boys adven­ture. Just anoth­er thing that makes Unbrand­ed feel like per­fect­ly good TV, but not a movie at all.

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