Being a Farmer Sucks

This year has often felt like the end times. The scope of apocalypse often feels global—refuges, wartime, Brexit, a possible Trump presidency. But if Peter and the Farm is any indication, it's that the prevailing sense of dread has entered even the most pastoral of regions and the effects, while smaller in scope, are largely devastating.

Peter and the Farm is part character study, part anthropology; both a love letter to a way of life and a warning against it. The documentary's focus, intimate and unwavering, is on Peter Dunning, a 68-year-old farmer and the sole human on a rural Vermont farm. He is a rugged individualist with a wild temper and a host of demons, a charismatic storyteller, a former artist, and a depressive alcoholic.

Filmmaker Tony Stone met Dunning as a child, when his family would visit the local farmer's market and chat him up as they bought produce. In the years since, Stone, now married, developed his friendship with Dunning until he was invited up to the mythic farm he'd grown up hearing about.

"When we went up to the farm, [Dunning] had been spending more time up there because he was coming off of his second DUI," says Stone. It was during that visit that he got the idea to shoot a documentary on the farm, which Dunning not only agreed to but added to: In addition to filming him and his work on the land, Stone could also document Dunning's intended suicide.

Four years after that visit, Peter and the Farm documents a year in Dunning's life, and the effect is somewhere between euphoric and harrowing. The suicide thankfully didn't come to pass, but the threat of death lingers thick; suicide is brought up often, as casual a notion as dinner plans. The full cycle of the seasons prove to be a smart through line: to understand both the repetition and the connectivity of Dunning's work, seeing it year round is narratively pragmatic as well as emotionally effective.

"The idea of the seasons was to show a cycle," Stone recently told me, over the phone. "To show the relationship between man and earth, and how it endlessly repeats—how it can be maddening."

Peter and the Farm strikes a smart balance between two worlds consistently. It's a careful look at the life of an individual, but it juxtaposes that isolationism with the fundamental principles of his work, which is to grow for a community. In that sense, as a product of the 60s counterculture, Dunning's loneliness proves to be a particularly devastating turn of events that the film unspools quietly. His alcoholism, perfectionism, and temper result in his alienation. Abandoned by his family (his second wife took off with the kids one early morning in the late 80s, taking the farm's truck with her), Dunning's view of his own existence has soured, leaving him with nothing but the farm he tends to with reckless obsession.

In one particularly grueling scene, Dunning, drunk and depressed, chops wood while screaming about the farm ("I care more about the farm than me"), his sons ("I don't even care, I hate him," he says of his oldest), and his mental state ("you don't know what insane fucking is"). The sound of the saw hacking the wood soundtracks his breakdown, with the camera's proximity making the acre-wide property feel miles away.

The film is a potent allegory: What do we pass on when we have no one to pass it on to? In an era of global warming, it's a question that goes far beyond the abstract, and into the overwhelmingly practical.

When the film begins, Stone shoots the pastoral landscapes like an alien planet. The throbbing opening song establishes a dread that often doesn't let up, except for choice moments when Peter recounts better times: a full house of young children, a diving board tethered to a pond, a night out drunkenly singing show tunes. Between Denning's highs and lows are blistering shots of the work itself, including uninterrupted takes of animal-slaughtering that aren't for the faint of heart, including a badly aimed gun shot to the head of a sheep, which Denning has to attempt for a second time. Through it all, the camera never wavers.

As the film's scope widens, the character begins to do the studying. Peter and the Farm is a film about extinction, and as Peter watches his way of life fall out of favor—both in America, and in his own pathologically complex relationship with his land—it feels as if he himself is vanishing, too.

"Peter started this farm in 1978, but it was another farm 100 years before that—so what is the next incarnation of it?" Stone said. "Is it going to be another farm or someone's country home? How do you really preserve something? It's such a universal conundrum."

The specificity of the film is what makes it so potent, but it's also something of a red herring. The way life looks and what life means is a vast chasm; the things that we purport to give us meaning can, in a sense, betray us and dare us to abandon them for nothing. Watching Peter grapple with his purpose makes for a truly human spectacle; it is profound and it is painful. No man is an island, but one man is a farm.

Follow Rod Bastanmehr on Twitter.

Peter and the Farm is now in theaters, on demand, on Amazon Video, and iTunes.