(courtesy IMP Awards)
Survival against all odds stories can often descend into overwrought melodrama with uncanny ease.
Maybe it’s because the creators of these larger than life tales are dealing with such hyperbolically enhanced events that it’s all too easy for them to get swept up in the adrenaline-rushed facts and to over-guild the narrative lily, taking what are already impactful moments and giving them such a thunderous cadence that their unmissable importance becomes nothing more than Shakespeare’s archetypal sound and fury signifying nothing.
Whatever the cause, and perhaps it’s as simple as too many Cokes and sugary lollies in the writers’ room, far too many of these disaster films end up feeling like a hard slog from a slow burning (literally in the case of the film under review) start to an orchestrally bombastic finish.
Not so The Lost Bus, the latest film from Bourne director, which manages to go big and epic and maintain a jaw-droppingly intense pace without once feeling like the storytelling hamsters on the wheel have gone into furiously over the top overdrive.
Based on the book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by Lizzie Johnson, The Lost Bus – which, to be fair, is an inert, almost bland title for a story which is anything but – tells the story of an incredible tale of survival by a school bus driver, a teacher and 22 very young students who somehow came out of the other end of the flames and lived to tell the tale during the horrifically deadly Camp Hill 2018 fire in California.
The deadliest wildfires in that state’s history, which claimed 85 lives and razed 13,500 structures to the ground, mainly in the rather unaptly named town of Paradise – for these hellishly fiery circumstances at least; normally, it would be picture perfect on point – they triggered the evacuation of some 30,000-plus people along just four roads in an extraordinarily finite period of time.
In the middle of this cataclysm, which was triggered at 6.30 one morning by fallen powerlines, which instantly sparked fires in the tinder dry landscape which at that point hadn’t seen rain for well in excess of 200 days, 22 students, whose parents couldn’t reach them to self evacuate, found themselves at Ponderosa Elementary School in dire need of imminent rescue.
The only bus driver within reach was Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) who answered the call to save others even though his own mother (played by the actor’s real life mother, Kay McCabe McConaughey) and his sick 15-year-old son, Shaun (Levi McConaughey, the real life son of the lead actor) were in the path of the fire.
Riven by an almost profound sense that he had failed Shaun as a father, and acutely aware of how much peril he was placing them in potentially, he went to Ponderosa to collect the 22 kids in danger, plus their teacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera) and get them across town to a nearby school where their parents could pick them up.
But between pick-up and delivery, the fire got massively and suddenly worse and suddenly what should have been a quick trip across town becomes a traffic nightmarish dash down lanes, back roads (with precipitous drops down the mountain) and through a raging inferno.
Taking place over a matter of a few hours, the ordeal sounds like perfect fodder for an overwrought retelling but surprisingly, or not when you consider who’s directing – he managed to make the Bourne movies, as blockbuster as you can get thanks to their genre and narrative punctuation points, feel nuanced and emotionally intimate – The Lost Bus feels centred and emotionally, quietly raw in ways very few films of this type even come close to managing.
In fact, for all the scale of the events surrounding this miraculously harrowing tale of survival, and Greengrass takes you down deep into the fire itself which feels like a living, growing creature, almost a character unto itself (yes that is a cliched reference but the cinematography is astonishingly visceral), what emerges most strongly is how two very ordinary people came to do some very extraordinarily lifesaving things.
The amazing thing is that for all brashness of a storyline that can’t be small because the events of the event most palpably were not, The Lost Bus feels like an intimate character study of two people forever bonded by what they went through in a short period of time where hope gave way to the certainty of death before somehow surrendering to life.
Literally going through an ordeal by fire, where flames licked at the side and back of the bus and aggressively leapt over the front, McKay in particular has an epiphany of sorts, realising that he’s made some very poor decisions but that there is way to do better should he actually survive.
While Ludwig’s arc isn’t quite as dramatic – she’s happily married with a son and a fulfilling career as a teacher – she nevertheless goes through what anyone would in that situation which is a drastic and sudden reassessing of life priorities which in her case means escaping the “safety” of Paradise more often for the open skies and possibilities of the wider world.
Both of these characters go from not knowing each other, and being in denial of their own failings, big and small, to looking into the face of death, and again literally when you consider they somehow escape being in the very heart of the fire, to seeing deep into themselves and bonding over their shared epiphanies of what they wanted their lives to be should they actually live.
The Lost Bus is a thrilling tale yes, and there are many moments where your heart is in your mouth and adrenaline is furiously coursing through your veins, but this is a movie that manages the gravity of what faced people on that fateful day and still go quietly and deeply into some very human and nakedly emotional moments, demonstrating as it does so with empathy and compassion, just what people are capable of when their backs are well and truly up against the wall.