In Annie Silverstein’s directorial debut, Bull, an unlikely friendship functions as the centerpiece in an honest and raw look at rodeo life and the everyday pain from which it serves as a distraction.
The film follows a teenage girl named Kris (Amber Havard) and her struggles living in a dilapidated area near Houston, Texas with her grandmother and little sister. Kris’ father isn’t in the picture and her mother is in jail. Silverstein captures this painful period in the girl’s life, a protracted kind of purgatory where she feels so disconnected from her surroundings that she subconsciously wrestles against them.
This isn’t the outright teenage rebellion we see so prevalently elsewhere in popular culture. Her acting out seems so much sadder, so perfunctory, as if this young girl sees no future for herself beyond the incarceration her mother wound up in, so she finds more and more petty rules to break in the hopes of accelerating that timeline. In her quest to immolate her own potential, she throws a party in her neighbor’s house while he’s away.
The neighbor, Abe (Rob Morgan), a black bull rider, presses charges before acquiescing and allowing Kris to work off her debt by cleaning his house. What then begins as a simple piece of attrition morphs into an open-ended spate of recreational servitude. Kris keeps turning up at Abe’s place and out of sheer disdain for having to see a young person throw themselves away with such abandon, he continues to find things for her to do around the house.
The two form a kinship that never settles into the quirky kinds of relationship a lesser indie flick might indulge in. Abe doesn’t become the father she’s never had and Kris doesn’t fill an unspoken void in his lonely life. Instead, it’s Abe’s profession that draws Kris in. The time she spends watching a bunch of young black men practice bull riding, seeing the passion in their eyes at the rodeo life, shows Kris there’s something more for her to hope for beyond becoming her own mother.
Silverstein does an incredible job of capturing the landscape around these two protagonists, drawing a fine line between the aimless and bereft youth Kris hangs out with in the film’s early scenes with the camaraderie she finds at the rodeo. But the real poetry of that dichotomy exists in the way the film portrays Abe.
Rob Morgan is an exemplary character actor, always giving more texture and believability to otherwise threadbare background players. Watching him work magic with more prominent placing in the narrative makes Kris’ journey more complex. Now, rather than living a dead-end life with no elders she can relate to or understand, she’s found something of a hero in a profession that, even with hard work and dedication, is just as likely to end her up in the same place she’s in now.
Morgan sells the years of pain and the stubborn self-destruction of the bull riding life, but none of his raggedy foibles detract from the pageantry Kris seems so taken with. The film seems to argue that it doesn’t matter if what you find to love is gonna grind you down, so long as you find something worth loving in the first place.
Bull is a fantastic debut, one that’s sure to keep Silverstein on the must watch list, but hopefully it helps Morgan get more leading man type roles in the future as well.
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