Josh O’Connor has been busy. He’s starred in three movies in just the past couple months: One was Wake Up Dead Man, Rian Johnson’s latest Knives Out mystery, which included what is probably O’Connor’s best role. The best movie of the group is Kelly Reichardt’s low-key heist-gone-wrong film The Mastermind. And now we have Rebuilding, which is the weakest of the three, but that’s largely because the other two are excellent, and this one is merely “good.” No shame in that, because it is certainly good.
In Rebuilding, O’Connor plays a cowboy named Dusty who’s just lost his ranch to wildfires in the Rockies. He’s set up in a FEMA trailer that doesn’t seem to have running water, and he clearly just doesn’t know what to do next, which, of course, who could blame him? He has a young daughter who lives with her mother, and Dusty goes to see them, apparently for the first time in a while. Dusty seems to have withdrawn far into himself at one point or another, and we can guess that it’s not just the loss of his livelihood that has done this to him, given how disconnected he seems from other people. He’s not standoffish, he’s just quiet, seems unsure, has trouble looking people in the eyes. And yes, Dusty does need to figure out how to rebuild, but the first part of that is rebuilding his ability to connect, which is where this film shines, in its gentle treatment of how people regard each other, sometimes in the face of devastation, and sometimes just in the face of life.
The film’s tone is lovely, even if we’ve seen some of the same sorts of images before in other movies set in the West, with people riding in the backs of pickup trucks while the grand scenery moves behind them and guitar music plays, with a man standing alone and the vast, mountainous world around him. Look, if I made this kind of movie, I’d shoot it that way, too. A movie that affirms our humanity doesn’t need to knock my socks off, and affirming humanity is what Rebuilding does.
Rebuilding is available on VOD.
