Mark Reviews Movies: BITTERBRUSH

Bitterbrush, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 16, 2022

Among the fields and mountains of Idaho, two women ride horses, herd cattle, and occasionally eat, rest, and talk about matters other than work in Bitterbrush. Director Emelie Mahdavian's relaxed and wandering documentary simply observes two range riders, who are contracted herders for cattle ranchers, doing the job they love and at which they are quite skilled. The movie is at its best when it allows us to appreciate just how difficult the work is and how good these two are at it.

There's a lot of that in Mahdavian's movie, which follows Colie Moline and Hollyn Patterson over the course of a herding season in isolated parts of the American West. The two have worked together for five or six years (Social media could tell for them certain, and there's something amusingly jarring about the mention of any modern technology, since there's no sign of it here), and their relationship is fascinating to watch. The women are both co-workers and friends, but there's also this deeper sense of two kindred spirits, whose bond doesn't exist between them but through the work itself.

It's difficult to describe, since the relationship isn't about what they say to or do for each other. The connection is simply present in every moment of their time together, just as there's always grass beneath them and mountains in the distance. The cinematography by Derek Howard and Alejandro Mejía simply captures the subjects and nature from multiple angles and distances, and that's all it needs to do for us to respect both.

The struggles here are common for their trade: looking for stray cows, trying to herd them together and to different grazing areas with calls and about a dozen dogs, finding time and a clean-enough spot to eat, dealing with their own and animals' exhaustion, and doing the same thing over and over again. One extended scene shows Patterson breaking a colt to ride, and without saying much about the process, the logic, as well as the grueling nature, of it becomes intrinsically apparent.

Mahdavian is clearly aware there's a limit to this. Either naturally or prompted, Moline and Patterson also discuss their lives, pasts, and ambitions to do and own more than what this job allows, even though contemporary farming and ranching is aimed at larger ventures and seemingly against the little guy. The personal and professional contexts offered by such conversations are intriguing, but since most of the movie is about on-the-ground and in-the-moment concerns, the usefulness of that information remains theoretical.

That is, of course, until life does get in the way or change this way of working for the two women. By then, though, Bitterbrush has mostly defined its subjects by what they do and how well they do it, so when it becomes more about their lives outside of that work, the movie hasn't found a meaningful way to invest in that aspect of these two.

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