Review: Bull Doesn’t Add Up to a Grand Vision of Poverty-Stricken Lives

Director Annie Silverstein tries to enrich the tropes of her class-conscious buddy scenario by canceling them out.

Bull
Photo: Samuel Goldwyn Films

In Bull, director Annie Silverstein applies a naturalistic aesthetic to a coming-of-age tale about a defeated elder and a directionless young buck teaching each other that life might have something left for them. This reliable genre chestnut most often surfaces in sports films, and Bull is set in Houston against a bull-riding scene where the participants are mostly African-American. Abe (Rob Morgan) is a middle-aged ex-bull rider, who now helps corral the bulls for younger and fitter cowboys. A hard drinker with a dependency on pain medication, Abe wears his profound pain and disappointment with himself in his physical bearing, eating and drinking alone in his small house, seemingly waiting out the clock.

The young person who instills Abe with purpose is Kris (Amber Havard), a 14-year-old girl who happens to live next door to him with part of her family. Feeling rootless, and frustrated with the flakiness of her imprisoned mother (Sara Allbright), Kris tests the limits of her alcoholic grandmother’s (Peggy Schott) authority, drifting into a life of drinking, drugging, and crime, which seems to be about all that anyone expects from the people of this particular neighborhood. One night, Kris and her friends break into Abe’s house and trash it in an explosion of drunken debauchery while the man is away at work, increasing the tensions of a preexisting conflict. Rather than press charges against Kris, Abe agrees to allow her to work off the damage, leading to her blossoming interest in bull riding.

If Bull was a mainstream film, Abe and Kris’s differences might be emphasized broadly, encouraging us to root for their eventual communion as fellow outcasts, as well as for Kris’s self-discovery as an aspiring bull rider. But “naturalism,” especially of the contemporary American indie-film variety, isn’t intended to sell such clichés. Instead, we’re supposed to feel the repetition of Abe and Kris’s poverty-stricken lives, and Silverstein correspondingly fetishizes their lack of articulation, in the spirit of many directors who celebrate tedium as a truthful refutation of the shtick of pop cinema, and who also seem to believe that poor people are incapable of having opinions or experiencing moments of lightness of spirit. Instead of offering pay-offs, Silverstein leaves all the narrative threads dangling, stretching out the first two acts of a conventional screenplay and omitting the third act altogether.

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Silverstein’s approach recalls the early films of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, which similarly omit clichés in an ironically clichéd manner, though Gabriel Mascaro’s extraordinary Neon Bull is more instructive in illustrating what Bull lacks. Mascaro dramatizes the tedium felt by poor people working in a rodeo as well, but he’s alive to the unexpected and exhilarating moments of transcendence that can occur, no matter what the setting. Whenever a scene develops an emotional momentum in Bull, Silverstein cuts it short, moving on to another sequence of stasis. There are very fine details in this film that poignantly illustrate Kris and Abe’s barebones existence—especially a shot of Kris wearing socks for gloves as she fixes Abe’s chicken coop—but they don’t quite cohere into a grand vision.

Morgan holds Bull together, as he has a ferocious physical intensity, allowing one to feel the emotions that Abe is attempting to tamp down with booze and drugs, and his eyes are an especially evocative thing of beauty. By contrast, Havard is intense in a closed-off, repetitive fashion. Watching her performance, it’s difficult to sort the intentional affectless-ness, which is a significant element of Silverstein’s aesthetic design, from the unintentional. Essentially, Bull is all atmosphere, which can be enough in the right context, but then one is compelled to wonder why Silverstein bothered exhuming the skeleton of a formula to begin with. The filmmaker tries to enrich the tropes of her class-conscious buddy scenario by canceling them out; we’re not even allowed to know if Kris sticks with bull riding. Good pop cinema is more honest about its intentions than muddled realism, which tends to define itself by an absence of pleasure that scans, in many cases, as an absence of true empathy.

Score: 
 Cast: Rob Morgan, Amber Havard, Yolonda Ross, Sara Allbright, Keira Bennett, Steven Boyd, Roishaun Davenport, Karla Garbelotto, Troy Anthony Hogan, Reece McClure, Peggy Schott  Director: Annie Silverstein  Screenwriter: Annie Silverstein, Johnny McAllister  Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Pictures  Running Time: 105 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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