★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
There’s hardly any media buzz around “Rebuilding,” a small indie movie about a family broken by divorce and a raging Colorado wildfire. The story unfurls with the intimacy of a whisper and a gut-instinct for resilience even in the face of cataclysm. You can’t watch a news program these days without seeing Americans displaced by fire and flood and the proliferating agonies of climate change. “Rebuilding,” the second remarkable film written and directed by Colorado native Max Walker-Silverman after “A Love Song,” takes clear-eyed stock of a harrowing situation with uncommon grit and grace.
“Rebuilding,” as its title suggests, is focused on finding a way back. In a scant one hour and 35 minutes, the film breaks your heart and then points the way to putting back the pieces. The sublimely gifted Josh O’Connor stars as Dusty, a Colorado cowboy whose daily life, 24/7, has been working his ranch. His constricted focus leaves little time for his wife Ruby (given tough, tender expression by the wonderful Meghann Fahey) and their nine-year-old daughter Callie-Rose, played by a tiny sorceress whose name—remember it—is Lily LaTorre.
It's little wonder that Ruby leaves her husband to move herself and Callie-Rose into the clapboard home of her mother, Bess (Amy Madigan, subtly switching gears from her bonkers brilliance in “Weapons”). The unthinkable happens when wildfires destroy the ranch and the only life Dusty knows. As this unhoused rancher crams his lanky frame into a FEMA trailer camp, he wonders if he has any future.
As it turns out, what Dusty has is the daughter he barely knows. “Mom says you didn’t apply yourself,” says Callie-Rose, echoing stinging words she can barely comprehend. But watching daughter and father find each other in the ruins of their past life gives the movie its bruised, bracing heart.
Young LaTorre makes Callie-Rose a force-field of emotions looking for a soft place to land. To bring her father out of his shell, she decorates his tiny trailer with glow-in-the-dark stars while he teaches her how to saddle a horse—small things, but in the sensitive hands of filmmaker Walker-Silverman, they can echo across canyons. This Colorado native knows the rhythms of his state’s less-traveled corners. His style is as un-Hollywood as a lazy breeze and just as refreshing.
Josh O’Connor works quiet miracles, using silence to show the ferocity and feeling churning inside as he looks for his place in the world.
Callie-Rose must do the heavy-lifting to make her father part of this new trailer community, which include a lesbian couple (Nancy Morlan and Kathy Rose) and a crazy woodsman (Christopher Young)...all part of Dusty’s newly created family of survivors.
At the core of it all is O’Connor, who continues his rise as one of the best actors of his generation. Ever since winning an Emmy for playing the young Prince Charles in “The Crown,” this shapeshifting British virtuoso continues to astound. He’s part of tennis sex triangle in “Challengers,” a lover of music and Paul Mescal in “The History of Sound,” a bumbling art thief in “The Mastermind,” and a priest mixed up in murder in “Wake Up Dead Man.” Word is O’Connor showed his acting chops when he was just seven in a school production of “The Wizard of Oz,” crediting the theater with helping him deal with his dyslexia.
Now O’Connor is helping us see the fissures of the human heart. In “Rebuilding,” O’Connor works quiet miracles, using silence to show the ferocity and feeling churning inside as Dusty as looks for his place in the world. Don’t ask what this graduate of the Bristol Old Vic could possibly have in common with this lost cowboy he’s playing. Just watch. And watch Walker-Silverman prove himself again as a major filmmaker who thrives working in a minor key. Together, actor and filmmaker have created a thing of beauty.