silverguide.site –

Here is a sweet, sad country song of a movie directed by Max Walker-Silverman; stoic and subdued. Josh O’Connor plays Dusty, a Colorado rancher who has just been hit by a wildfire, losing to the flames property which had been in the family for generations. The movie begins with the stark panorama of charred trees in a scorched and arid landscape; the farmland is still his, but utterly barren for the forthcoming decade, a grim assessment made by a bank official who rejects Dusty’s application for a loan with the land as collateral.

Like many local people in the same situation, Dusty now has to live in a spartan trailer in a government-funded emergency camp, and he takes a mortifying job working on the highway. His crisis has meant a new poignancy in his connection with ex-wife Ruby (Meghann Fahy), 10-year-old daughter Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre) and his kindly, caring but ailing mother-in-law Bess, played by Amy Madigan (recently an Oscar-winner for her performance in Weapons). When Dusty collects Callie-Rose for regular visits, she now has to come to his grim trailer and they have to park up by the local library in his pickup to pinch the wifi so Callie-Rose can do homework on her tablet.

Dusty claims he can rebuild, but his only chance of a job is working for his cousin in distant Montana. Yet he rebuilds his relationship with Ruby, Callie-Rose and Bess and a sense of community in his own existence with his fellow trailer-occupants, particularly the tough Mali (Kali Reis); the film allows us to suspect the promise of something more than friendship there. As Dusty, Mali and the others gather around the camp fire, Rebuilding looks like a cousin to Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland.

But as so often in US cinema, the words “climate change” are not mentioned, and there is no sense from anyone that wildfires are going to get more frequent, still less that the federal government should do something, other than provide the precarious temporary help of that trailer camp. Even so, wildfires have long been a fact of life in the American west; another film that it resembles is Paul Dano’s Wildlife, based on the Richard Ford novel, with Jake Gyllenhaal as the errant husband and father who goes off on a job fighting wildfires and returns with a burnt-out look of exhaustion. It is another highly sympathetic performance from O’Connor, who converts the British reticence of his earlier roles into Dusty’s strength and quiet vulnerability.

• Rebuilding is in UK cinemas from 17 April.