Rebuilding Paradise

When I say that a film is depressing, I am NOT necessarily saying you shouldn't watch it or that it's a bad film. This Ron Howard documentary is well made and interesting but it also cannot help but leave you feeling down when it has ended. I also mention it because I strongly encourage people dealing with depression NOT to watch it, as it might leave you more down as a result of watching.

The story is about a town oddly named 'Paradise' in Central California, just north of Chico and about 90 minutes north of Sacramento. Due to neglect by Pacific Gas & Electric, an electrical fire burned nearly all of the town to the ground. The film is about the first year after the fire and how the folks are coping with the disaster and upheaval.

Despite being made by a Hollywood insider, Howard, it has the look of a movie shot with the simplest of cameras...better than iPhones but sort of a cheap videocamera look. This is not a complaint...more an observation. It consists of photos, stock video and lots of interviews with the locals. Best of all, it has no narration...something it share with many better documentaries. Overall, it's very well made and interesting...especially for folks like me who live relatively close to Paradise and have seen PG&E's reaction to lawsuits concerning the fire.

The documentary which opens with fire footage, centers on the survivors' emotional journeys and emphasizes their will to take back their lives. The documentary, which emphasizes the difficulties of environmental dangers, trauma, and bureaucratic red tape, strikes a balance between hopelessness and despair. It also honors the indomitable spirit of individuals who live in Paradise. Viewers are left thinking about human resiliency and the value of group power in recovering from unspeakable tragedy.

#AMovieADay 139

REBUILDING PARADISE

More than a in-depths documentary this feels rather like a tribute to the poor community of Paradise in California, devastated by the Camp Fire in 2018 in which 85 people lost their lives and more than 18000 homes destroyed (not to mention the hundreds or thousands of acres of forests burnt to the ground). Ron Howard turns to documentary (not for the first time: only in the last few years he did one on the Beatles and Pavarotti) but like often in his movies, he manages to produce a handsome, properly crafted piece of work and yet a rather unmemorable one too (yes there are exceptions: Frost/Nixon is great, Rush was good, I have a soft spot for Cocoon and Apollo 13... but the Dan Brown film are really terrible). The beginning is probably the best thing in the film. Dash-cam and mobile footage shot by residents trying to escape the fire is edited together to create a real sense of what must have been like to feel trapped in the blaze with smoke so dark to turn day into night. It's claustrophobic and terrifying. Beyond that, Howard chooses to stick with the victims throughout the whole documentary, preferring to show their grief and their determination to rebuild rather than exploring any of the real issues at stake here, even when big subjects come up (like global warming or the reasons beyond the fast spread of the fire). It's a very narrow-vision point of view of such a massive scale disaster that it feels a bit like a wasted opportunity. Emotions runs high (though some are heavy handed and superfluous to the main story), and you may even shed a few tears (that's not hard to do when dealing with such a disaster) but beyond that I found it a bit frustrating and slightly superficial.

It's so sad how Paradise burned in the fire, and this footage captures not only the despair that goes with it but some breathtaking footage of those escaping the fire. It really shows how fast things can spiral out of control. It could have done a better job with talking about how these fires start and how to prevent them, but it was a well done human interest piece about rebuilding.

The inferno inside that fire is awe inspiring to see, and the devastation is brutal. The aftermath is full of things that you'd only come to understand once a catastrophe like this unfolds. Also showing the side of humans helping a community to rebuild their lives makes for a good story in this documentary.