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“Rebuilding” belongs to a genre that’s now past its sell-by date: the slow-moving Sundance red-state movie. By red state, I don’t mean that the politics are right wing in any overt way. I mean that the drama is mired in the fetishistic trappings of the American West — the horses and farm houses, the sunbaked wilderness, the small-town banks and bare-bones convenience stores, the men walking around in Stetsons and cowboy boots, the dialogue that’s so laconic you could drive a pickup truck between the lines.
At a place like Sundance, this sort of movie has always exerted a hip countercultural appeal — a feeling of “Look, even a festival as progressive as ours can dig these neo-traditionalist signifiers!” Today, when the premiere of “Rebuilding” ended, the applause was long and deep. I’m sorry, though, I found it to be a semi-dud, the sort of movie that’s way too self-consciously austere, and then tries to take all that paced-like-Antonioni-on-a-saddle dryness and drown it in sentimentality.
The star is Josh O’Connor, who in “Challengers” gave my favorite performance by an actor last year. So I was more than eager to see how O’Connor, who is British, would do playing a melancholy American rancher. He does just fine. He’s an authentic presence, scraggly and taciturn in a soulful way, and he communicates the quiet anguish at the heart of Dusty, a character who has lost everything. The film is set two months after a massive wildfire, which gives it an eerie and resonant overlap with the fires in Los Angeles. Dusty, it seems, lost his beloved ranch, which was built by his great-grandfather. It sat on the edge of a clearing, a beautiful spot that is now a vacant stretch of earth surrounded by spindly charred tree trunks.
But there’s another loss enfolded into that one, a loss that’s just sort of…there. Dusty has an ex-wife, Ruby (Meghann Fahy), who lives in a cozy house in town, and they have a daughter, Callie Rose (Lily LaTorre), who looks to be seven or eight. She lives with Ruby (and her male partner), and we get the feeling that Dusty doesn’t see the girl too much. Why not? In its monosyllabic Western chic way, it’s as if the film were saying, “Don’t ask for no damn explanation. That’s for city slickers.”
Maybe so, but this is one city slicker who would like to have seen the background of Dusty, Ruby, and Callie colored in more. Especially since Josh O’Connor and Meghann Fahy have a nice serene energy together (we’re told that the two characters had their first date when they were 12), and her boyfriend comes off as the odd rube out. Due to the minimalist backstory, there’s a part of us, in our childish moviegoing hearts, that thinks, “Why can’t Dusty just move back in with his family?” Amy Madigan is on hand as Callie’s grandmother, Bess, who’s all sweetness and pot plants, and she just adds to the homespun frontier quaintness of it all.
Dusty, in fact, has moved into a sterile white-on-white trailer home that’s part of an encampment of six such trailers that have been set up, in the middle of nowhere, as an emergency relief measure. There are a handful of other people there who’ve lost their homes. As they gather to share meals, and share a word or two about their dire straits, a makeshift community forms.
When Dusty takes Callie out for the afternoon and brings her over to the trailer home, it feels almost like he’s an absentee dad, and that this is the first time he’s had visitation. “Rebuilding” is a father-daughter bonding movie meets a “Nomadland”-as-scaled-down-trailer-park movie. Dusty has a contingency plan — he might go to Montana and find work on his cousin’s ranch. But he’s also got a post-wildfire dream. He owns the 200 acres of land that his ranch sat on, and he hopes to rebuild it. He explains to Callie that he wants to recreate the farm house just as it was, right down to the pot-belly stove. When she comes over and they put glow-in-the-dark stars on the walls of his trailer, you feel the hope.
But Dusty, at a meeting with the local banker, learns that his dream has been squashed. It was a “high severity” wildfire, so his land will be unfarmable for 8 to 10 years. “Rebuilding” presents us with a devastating situation: a man who hasn’t just lost his ancestral home, but has seen his entire life go up in smoke. Yet a situation isn’t the same thing as a dramatic conflict. I was touched, at moments, by O’Connor’s woeful countenance, but as written and directed by Max Walker-Silverman, “Rebuilding” has no motor. At the end, when it tries to lift our hearts, all I had was a question: How is Dusty going to make a living? Maybe it’s appropriate, in 2025, that a Sundance red-state movie never even bothered to figure that out.