Review: Rebuilding

Director:  Max Walker-Silverman

Stars:  Kali Reis, Lily LaTorre, Josh O’Connor

Between the handsome Colorado desert views rolling up to distant mountains to the sweet, lulling guitar-plucked score from James Ellington and Jake Xerxes Fussell (not enough Xerseses around these days), Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding is a hard movie to outright dislike. It’s nice, almost to a fault. And it has the ever-amiable Josh O’Connor in the lead, comfy now having played a handful of these hangdog types. But while this low-tempo tale of dispossessed American transience doesn’t particularly ruffle feathers, sometimes its hard to discern whether its even there. Like the soil of the burned out family plot at the heart of this story, it’ll blow right through your fingers at the slightest breeze.

Dusty (O’Connor) is in a bit of a jackpot. Forest fires have wiped out his property and have rendered the land unfarmable. FEMA have relocated him to a temporary trailer park on scrubland, but the future is quite uncertain. A cowboy at heart, his community job as a human stop sign for a stretch of highway maintenance isn’t going to keep him going for long. The situation does, however, provide him the opportunity to reconnect with his middle-school aged daughter Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre).

The father-daughter bonding side of the story is played well enough, but lacks inspiration. We’ve seen countless of these before. LaTorre is a good find, however, as comfortable in Walker-Silverman’s lower register as the rest of the cast. Rebuilding is stronger when focusing on the notions of community that spring out of this natural (or arguably man-made) disaster. Initially, Dusty is reticent to connect with the ragtag bunch of fellow refugees corralled around him, but the efforts of his new and persistent neighbour Mila (Kali Reis) quickly thaw him out. The blankness of the FEMA trailers slowly evolves as the new residents decorate them and, contemporaneously, knit together as a collective. Most of these players are sketched in with Reis the highlight as their figurehead. The sense of displaced peoples clinging together recalls the more poetic likes of Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland or Gianfranco Rosi’s diamond-in-the-rough doc Below Sea Level (exceedingly worth finding).

Walker-Silverman’s aim, it seems, is to use gentleness as a weapon to rebuke unfeeling and nonsensical systems (online forms are available, but Wi-Fi isn’t), and Rebuilding presents as a brittle recession drama with bags of compassion for the so-called flyover states. Mila fosters community and community fosters generosity. It’s grassroots, softly heartwarming stuff, without a bad word (or even a curse word) for anyone. In this vision of America, everyone’s trying their best. Even the bank manager’s sorry.

But often the drab, muted colour palette matches the slight, reticent register a little too well. Reconstruction may be Walker-Silverman’s aim, but it can feel as though he doesn’t quite have enough materials. I admire the urge to resist hyperbole and overwrought drama, but you’ve gotta have something in it’s place. The pulse of Rebuilding is so low it risks cultivating ambivalence. And that lilting, pretty music ultimately doesn’t help any. I found I had to remind myself to pay attention, my mind was so encouraged to wander by all this passive non-drama.

Off to the sides there’s some nominal familial tension with Callie-Rose’s mother Ruby (Meghann Fahy), although actually not really as everyone seems to get along just fine. Amy Madigan isn’t really put to any use as Dusty’s mother-in-law Bess, save for an act of bittersweet providence that allows Dusty’s predicament a neatly sentimental solution. Not to be too cynical, but it seems that’s the only reason that the character exists. And while O’Connor smiles sweetly through it all, occasionally with a tear in his eye, this feels not so much low-effort as simply untaxing for him.

Rebuilding doesn’t kill with kindness – it hasn’t a mean bone in it’s body – but it’s a shade too soporific to get in any way excited about. Nice landscapes, mind.