2 hours ago
4
The political context has been scorched away in Paul Greengrass’s empowering inferno. This is a dynamically shot and earnestly performed real-life disaster movie about California’s terrifying 2018 Camp fire, a darkness-at-noon horror that became the deadliest wildfire in California history, killing 85 people and razing more than 150,000 acres. Greengrass and co-screenwriter Brad Ingelsby have taken their inspiration from Lizzie Johnson’s 2021 book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, about the calamity and the ironically named town caught up in it, pointing up the extraordinary, unassuming courage of school-bus driver Kevin McKay who piloted a busload of screaming kids and their teacher through hell to safety.
America Ferrera plays the caring, if slightly prim teacher Mary Ludwig and Matthew McConaughey is the rough, sweaty everyman hero behind the wheel – with whom, in the time-honoured style of Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, Mary is to have an emotional connection. Before the fire, Kevin had been a loser and a screwup, alienated from his son and ex-wife, on the verge of getting fired from his school-bus-driving job (due to honest errors attributable to family worries) – but of course highly eligible for the heroic redemption that the fire will provide.
As this terrible blaze – sparked by a poorly maintained power line – sweeps across the state, we see everything periodically from the fire’s own point of view, whooshing along with it and the glowing embers through the smoky chaos. A school desperately needs to be evacuated as the fire closes in; no other vehicle is available and Kevin steps up, neglecting his own sick son in the process. (In truth, it is only a bottle of Tylenol he was due to deliver to the boy, who is in any case under the care of his grandma, so it is not exactly a life-or-death dilemma.)
As he drives them through the chaotic inferno, out of radio contact, with the bus encountering gridlock and gun-toting rioters, almost literally bursting into flames with the heat, with air quality near unbreathable and the children losing consciousness, Mary almost thinks the unthinkable: might it not be better to let the kids fall asleep, rather than burn to death? “Don’t talk like that,” says Kevin. Meanwhile, at fire department HQ, the top brass are making increasingly panicky announcements, prefaced with: “Listen up people …”
But wait. Whose fault is all this? The electrical company were found liable in the courts, as the titles over the closing credits confirm. President Trump (whose name is not mentioned in the film) blamed bad forest management. But there is one scene in which the tortured fire chief announces to a press conference that there are more and more fires like this and … his voice trails away, overcome with (understandable) emotion. He can’t quite bring himself to say the words “climate crisis” out loud – but I would have liked to see something on the closing credits about the increasing incidence of these wildfires. This is the point, and the film is in danger of missing it.
