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‘Rebuilding’ Review: Josh O’Connor Is a Rancher Who’s Lost Everything in a Drama That Mostly Just Sits There
Max Walker-Silverman's film is about the aftermath of a wildfire, but despite its devastating premise the movie mostly just sits there.
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. 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.
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