The cowboy – strong but silent, a lonely figure caught between small town domesticity and the absolute freedom of the wilderness – has experienced something of a reinvention in the past few years, mostly in the hands of women filmmakers. Chloé Zhao’s The Rider and Nomadland, Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog and Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow all use the genre framework of the Western to interrogate the forces of masculine repression, colonial violence and national identity.
Rebuilding confronts an imminent threat that’s still very much rooted in these issues; climate change and environmental collapse. We find taciturn cowboy Dusty (Josh O’Connor in hangdog mode) amid skeletal dead trees, hardly able to look at the burnt out remains of his family ranch. Wildfires have swept through Colorado, and as a perpetual loner he’s initially frustrated at being rehoused in an emergency camp with other displaced locals. But being forced into a more domestic sphere also prompts a long overdue reconnection with his young daughter Callie Rose (Lily LaTorre).
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That’s pretty much it in terms of plot. Inspired by his grandmother’s house being destroyed by wildfires, writer-director Max Walker-Silverman’s follow up to 2022’s A Love Song is similarly sparse, delicate and light on exposition (complimentary). Rebuilding was shot in 2023, and if it was in any danger of being stuck in movie purgatory it was surely saved by the ascendency of Josh O’Connor and Amy Madigan’s moment in the spotlight, here in a supporting role as Dusty’s former mother-in-law Bess.
Madigan doesn’t get much to do, and while O’Connor is always a compelling screen presence his performance here of stoicism masking vulnerability doesn’t feel as challenging or intriguing as some of his more recent work in films like The Mastermind or Wake Up Dead Man. His best scenes are with The White Lotus’ brilliant Meghann Fahy as his ex-wife Ruby, in which we see the subtle interplay of their longstanding affection and old resentments.
So far so boilerplate American indie, but where the film really shines is in its depiction of community, especially in the emergency camp where a pseudo family cooks and eats together, sharing what little they have in the face of hardship. Vignettes include an elderly lesbian couple tending to their makeshift garden and an eccentric hermit wordlessly showing Dusty and single mum Mila (Kali Reis) hopeful signs of the forest’s regrowth. Another quietly charming sequence features townsfolk gathering in the library car park at sunset to take advantage of the free WiFi after closing time. These moments echo the lyricism of Chloé Zhao’s work at its best but, like Zhao, Walker-Silverman sometimes can’t seem to resist a bit of cloying, overwrought score to over-egg the proverbial pudding.
The film’s most fundamental flaw is its inoffensive, overall unchallenging pleasantness, both in the rather generic story of Dusty bonding with his daughter and one too many shots of him staring morosely out over the Colorado mountains. It all feels like familiar territory, and one wishes Walker-Silverman could have spent more time with the collective, and less with the Sad Lone Cowboy.
