Rebuild Review – Josh O’Connor Barzak cuts back on life after bushfire trauma | film

HThere’s a beautiful, sad country song for a movie directed by Max Walker Silverman; Stoic and submissive. Josh O’Connor plays Dusty, a Colorado farmer who has just been hit by a wildfire and loses his property that has been in the family for generations. The film opens with a stark panorama of charred trees in a scorched, barren landscape. The farmland still belongs to him, but it is completely barren for the next decade, a bleak assessment made by the bank official who rejected Dusty’s application for a loan with the land as collateral.

Like many locals in the same situation, Dusty now has to live in a simple trailer in a government-funded emergency camp, and take on a stressful job working on the highway. His crisis means a new strain on his relationship with his ex-wife Ruby (Megan Fahey), his 10-year-old daughter Callie Rose (Lily Latour) and his kind, caring but patient mother-in-law Bess, played by Amy Madigan (who recently won an Oscar for her performance in Arms). When Dusty collects Callie-Rose for regular visits, she now has to come to his grim trailer and they have to park next to the local library in his pickup truck to hook up to the wifi so Callie-Rose can do her homework on her tablet.

Dusty claims he can rebuild, but his only chance of a job is working for his cousin in faraway Montana. However, he rebuilds his relationship with Ruby, Callie Rose, and Bess, and also rebuilds his sense of community in his presence with his fellow trailer occupants, particularly the difficult Mallie (Cally Reese); The film allows us to doubt the promise of something more than friendship there. As Dusty, Mali and the others gather around a campfire, the rebuilding process looks like a cousin of Chloe Zhao’s nomadic land.

But as is often the case in American cinema, the words “climate change” are not mentioned, and there is no sense on anyone’s part that wildfires will become more frequent, let alone that the federal government should do anything, other than provide risky temporary aid through this trailer camp. However, wildfires have long been a fact of life in the American West; Another Paul Dano-like wilderness film, based on Richard Ford’s novel, with Jake Gyllenhaal as a wayward husband and father who goes to a job fighting wildfires and returns looking burned out from exhaustion. It’s another deeply sympathetic performance from O’Connor, who transforms the British reserve of his previous roles into Dusty’s strength and quiet vulnerability.