In his masterful documentary Rebuilding Paradise, former child star and renowned director-producer Ron Howard trains his camera on a real-life disaster. On the morning of November 8, 2018, an electric transmission line located in Butte County, in Northern California caught fire. Pushed along by powerful east wind and aided by drought conditions, the fire burned through a vast area which included the town of Paradise. It took just three hours for Paradise to turn to ash. At the end of the day, eighty-five people were dead and more than thirty thousand left homeless.
The tragedy, which became known as the Camp Fire disaster, was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. Because his mother-in-law had once lived in Paradise, Howard knew the town well. Visiting a month after the fire, he was shocked by the extent of the tragedy. Everyone had lost so much. After long hours of speaking with the survivors, he felt a need to capture their story. Though the vast majority of residents abandoned the town a small but determined group returns home to plan the town's next chapter.
Howard splices together video footage shot by residents and emergency responders and places us in the passenger seat of a car that is leaving town. From the windows, we see burning houses and trees, orange skies, and clouds of grey smoke, and the apocalyptic image of riderless horses. We join the driver in a slow-moving motor convoy attempting to leave town. We listen to him, feeling his complex blend of emotions—a cool logic balanced against the very real fear that he won't make it out alive, and we breathe a huge sigh of relief when he reaches the clear blue skies of safety.
Howard observes the survivors now living in tents and trailers contemplating the future of their beloved town, its name now a bitter irony. Some believed the task to rebuild was too great and the town's location within a heavily forested and fire-prone area too risky. But there is a small, determined core who won't let their town disappear, including the former mayor, school psychologist, a police officer, and the film's heroine Michele Jones, the superintendent of schools who becomes the driving force behind the town's renaissance.
It is Jones's quixotic but ultimately successful determination to host high school graduation six months after the fire that gives the film its powerful dramatic arc. Though Howard lets us hear a discussion about the guilt of the local power company, including a cameo appearance by the real-life Erin Brockovich, he mostly avoids politics. He’s after something much bigger and far more universal—a story about people who are able to start again after losing everything.
Perhaps it is his Happy Days and Mayberry past that drew Howard to this story of heroism in small-town America but this material is the perfect canvas for his storytelling genius. Combining elegant and often breathtaking cinematography with a patchwork script of the survivors' own voices, Howard crafts a masterful portrayal of human resilience with deep universal resonance.
Included in our list of Best Documentaries 2021.
