Movie Review ‘Rebuilding Paradise’: Ron Howard Makes a Libertarian Parable

The town in Northern California is named Paradise, but infernal scenes mark the dizzying start of a Ron Howard documentary about California’s worst-ever wildfires, in 2018. The sky is black as midnight at 7 a.m. Patients are evacuated from a hospital. A car sits flaming in a driveway. A refrigerator stands in an ashy mess where the rest of the house around it used to be. Horses trot nervously up a roadway. Fleeing families report the windshield of their car is too hot to touch, or ask, “Am I going to die?” Eighty-five people did, and thousands of buildings were destroyed. The name attached to the blaze was a dry understatement: the “Camp Fire.”

All of this happens before the opening credits of Rebuilding Paradise, Howard’s film for National Geographic, a theatrical release that is largely about the aftermath of that fire. Howard’s instinct is to tell stories of embattled Americans willing themselves past adversity, in such films as Apollo 13, Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind, and the upcoming Hillbilly Elegy, but his style isn’t quite a match for the subject he chose this time. After that nerve-frying beginning, Howard tries to shape Rebuilding Paradise into yet another story of pluck and grit, but it’s really a story of the various ways government fails even the neediest and worthiest of citizens.

The town in Northern California is named Paradise, but infernal scenes mark the dizzying start of a Ron Howard documentary about California’s worst-ever wildfires, in 2018. The sky is black as midnight at 7 a.m. Patients are evacuated from a hospital. A car sits flaming in a driveway. A refrigerator stands in an ashy mess where the rest of the house around it used to be. Horses trot nervously up a roadway. Fleeing families report the windshield of their car is too hot to touch, or ask, “Am I going to die?” Eighty-five people did, and thousands of buildings were destroyed. The name attached to the blaze was a dry understatement: the “Camp Fire.”

All of this happens before the opening credits of Rebuilding Paradise, Howard’s film for National Geographic, a theatrical release that is largely about the aftermath of that fire. Howard’s instinct is to tell stories of embattled Americans willing themselves past adversity, in such films as Apollo 13, Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind, and the upcoming Hillbilly Elegy, but his style isn’t quite a match for the subject he chose this time. After that nerve-frying beginning, Howard tries to shape Rebuilding Paradise into yet another story of pluck and grit, but it’s really a story of the various ways government fails even the neediest and worthiest of citizens.