Portrait of West trades sentimentality for sheep

I have never seen anything quite like “Sweetgrass,” the new documentary premiering Sunday at the Guild Cinema.

It’s a film that, from its beginning, harshly denies context, characterization and dramatic question. It contains no direct interviews, and no precursory text that might establish what’s at stake. It simply consists of two tired men, their flocks of sheep, the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains and a camera. Let’s just say that I’m fully prepared to overuse the word “contemplative.”

The two ranchers and their herds cross 150 miles of treacherous mountain terrain for something called “summer pasture,” which the film doesn’t bother to explain. “Sweetgrass” isn’t interested in the technicalities of old-fashioned sheep farming. It’s interested in the imagery, and what it means to have a world where factory farming is becoming more common. Where cows are milked by machines and chickens are raised in claustrophobic warehouses by the thousands. “Sweetgrass” is an exercise in preservation: It honors the spirit, the quiet struggle and subsequent triumph of old, endangered ways of life.

And it does so not through outright discussion with its human subjects, as we might expect from a documentary, but through stunningly deliberate and meaningful cinematography. To really put things in perspective, there’s no dialogue, and no human interaction until about a half-hour into the film. But even then it’s extremely sparse.

Instead, “Sweetgrass” is deeply, thoughtfully natural, taking its time on a particularly striking shot of a lone sheep grazing, or one of the herds descending a mountain. There’s no music to dramatize. Sentimentality doesn’t exist in this film.

An example is a shot of one of the ranchers assisting in the birth of a baby lamb, but instead of it being predictably adorable and overhyped, it appears as routine to him as shearing wool. He sees the lamb’s legs jutting out, yanks it from the mother and then expresses his disappointment that she won’t be having more. This is life raising sheep. You let them graze, shear them and keep their babies alive. And eventually, you take them out for three months travel for summer pasture.

Unfortunately, it’s over this journey that the film loses some of its majesty. With no context, no idea of where these men are going and no real connection to the men themselves, how many contemplative shots of sheep can we endure? There are moments that serve climactic purpose, like when a grizzly bear mauls a member of the flock. But even this tapers off with a frustrating lack of resolution.

In this way, “Sweetgrass” is a little too big a slice of life; its slow, unspoken nature, while beautiful and serene, left me starved for an emotional high point. Who are these men, really? How does this truly epic journey through untainted nature affect them? What do they have to risk, and to gain? Who do they leave behind? What are they afraid of? We get small glimpses into their personalities, but they only left me wanting more, and the film refuses to let us in.

And then finally it actually does. Near the conclusion there’s a brilliant, shocking two or three minutes of intense, 100 percent humanity. And in “Sweetgrass” that’s like getting a glass of ice water directly to the face. I feel I’d be doing a disservice if I described it in great detail, but it involves one of the ranchers speaking to his mother on a cell phone. He’s tired of this life, he said. He just wants to get away. He’d “rather enjoy these mountains than hate them.” Where did this raw sense of helplessness come from, and where did it go? My biggest problem with “Sweetgrass” is that it doesn’t seem to care. It just gets back to its business beautifully and quietly filming sheep.