In Montana, ranchers are caring for their sheep. They get sheared. They get fed. There are births. After the winter, the ranchers take the herd through the summer pasteurs on public lands in the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains. It is 2003 and it is the last band of sheep.This is a little zen. It brings the audience into the sheep ranch. It takes us into the herd. I don't even want to have the ranchers talk. The main drawback is that it is not necessarily a 100 minutes worth of attention. I got antsy by the midway point. It would be a better hour-long TV show. The scenery is epic. It has beautiful vast vistas and also the gritty small pictures.

A documentary on the life of Montana sheepherders, "Sweetgrass" looks for all the world as if it had been strung together from a series of "Brokeback Mountain" outtakes. I guess that's inevitable given the subject matter and setting, but this seems almost like a nonfiction version of that movie - minus the movie stars and gay romance, that is (and it's not as beautifully filmed).What most distinguishes "Sweetgrass" from other documentaries is that there is no voice-over narration to explain or analyze what's going on. And the individuals who appear in the film are every bit as taciturn and tight-lipped as one would expect the people in this particular setting to be. The movie simply chronicles the day-to-day task of raising, herding and shearing sheep without feeling the need to comment on what it's showing us. The drawback is that we never get to know much about the rugged men and women involved in the business, what makes them tick (indeed, they talk to their animals more than they do each other). At some point, however, we do begin to understand the toll all this loneliness, physical exertion and exposure to the elements begins to take on the people who do this job.The result is an admittedly repetitive and frequently tedious exercise in filmmaking that also casts a strangely hypnotic spell over its audience. Perhaps it's the fact that movies rarely just show us people working at their professions that makes this film compelling in its uniqueness. And the image of hundreds of sheep crowding down the main street of town on their way to pasture is bound to stick with you despite any doubts you might have as to whether they are truly fit subjects for a full-length feature.

I saw "Sweet Grass" with four other people, one of whom enjoyed the Montana scenery, one of whom belonged to a family that had raised sheep and thought the film misrepresented reality and three of whom, counting me, were bored out of their skulls. The dialog -- "Baa" is the dominant word at the start, a multiplicity of curses that would shame a sailor hold sway toward the end, and repetitive out of tune singing is interspersed along with a lot of yips and yells intended to startle the sheep into movement -- is of negative interest. Among the misrepresentations according to the sheep-in-the-family viewer: Mother sheep don't generally recognize their own offspring, certainly not by scent; shearing generally occurs in the summer, not in the dead of winter. (Though I promised my son-in-law 20 sheep as a dowry, which my wife would never allow me to deliver, I can't vouch for any of this. However, there was no slaughtering of sheep for meat, which none of us found credible considering the size of the operation.) However, I can personally attest that this film produces less poetry than the phone book. If you are interested in watching thousands of sheep behave like thousands of sheep and herders struggle with getting them to and from summer pasture, be my guest. But consider yourself forewarned.

I can't believe I saw the same movie as the earlier reviewers. I've never been to Montana, but I have to think it is more beautiful than is depicted in this sorry, plot-less, direction-less and dialogue-less excuse for a movie. It would be acceptable as a one-hour documentary on PBS, and of historical interest, but a "movie"? - not in my book. I'm not a fan of Hollywood blockbusters, but I do like my movies (or documentaries) to have some combination of plot, acting, music, dialogue or scenery - this one has none of them. While I accept that a sheepherder's life is demanding, virtually the only expression of this is via an occasional vocal outburst. Is it a spoiler if I reveal that practically nothing happens for the entire duration of the movie?