It turns out that Kathryn Bigelow isn’t the only director who has surfaced at this year’s fall festivals to prove just how adept they are at muscular, adrenalized filmmaking. Three days after Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite” premiered at the Venice Film Festival and reasserted her mastery of taut and urgent storytelling, Paul Greengrass came to the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday for the world premiere of “The Lost Bus,” a headlong piece of terrifying real-life action from the director of “United 93,” “Captain Phillips” and three Jason Bourne movies.
The film, which is set amid the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history, is the latest entry in a trend that began with Greengrass’ first film, 1989’s “Resurrected,” and continued through “Bloody Sunday,” “United 93,” “Green Zone,” “Captain Phillips” and “22 July,” all based on true stories and most driven by virtuoso action sequences.
Greengrass is far from a one-trick pony — “22 July” was remarkably gripping and provocative even though much of it took place in a courtroom — but the best moments of “The Lost Bus” are for the most part the ones that take advantage of his skill at staging large-scale action. In this case, that action is a bus trip through a literal hell on earth, as a scruffy school bus driver teams up with a grade-school teacher to shepherd a group of children through the blazing inferno that consumed the town of Paradise, California in November, 2018.
That way into the story came from Lizzie Johnson’s nonfiction book “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire,” which Jamie Lee Curtis and Jason Blum brought to Greengrass with the idea that the personal story of those two people and the bus would be the way into an examination of the conflagration.
There’s plenty of backstory before driver Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) and teacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera) set off, most of it involving Kevin’s strained relationship with his sullen and angry teenage son Shaun (played by McConaughey’s real-life son, Levi), and his mixed feelings about returning to Paradise, the town where he grew up, in the aftermath of a divorce and the death of his father.
But it’s clear from the moment the film opens with the camera swooping over electric power lines snaking through the forested mountains of Northern California that the heart of “The Lost Bus” is in movement and momentum. From the start, Pal Ulvik Rokseth’s camera is restless; it flies overhead, nudges up against the windows of the bus that Kevin is driving and occasionally dips inside the bus, but there’s an energy that surrounds activity as mundane as dropping off the kids or gassing up the bus.
The driver, it seems is down on his luck and unable to communicate with the son who blames him for the move to this small town so that Kevin can look after his frail mother, who has been a widow since the death of her husband four months earlier. McConaughey looks bedraggled from the start, but he’s got an ailing dog named Elvis and he plays Chris Stapleton’s “Broken Halos” on his radio, so we know at heart he’s a good guy.
There’s some nuance to the way this history is laid out (and also some way-too-obvious foreshadowing, as when son yells, “I f—ing hate you, I wish you were dead”) — but we’re essentially waiting for the camera to return to those power lines, which will spark and break in the high winds and start a series of small fires early one morning.
That’s when the propulsion that has long been a Greengrass trademark kicks in: The scattered fires begin to rage within the first half hour of the movie, and from there it’s just a matter of how long the director can keep the audience immersed in this deadly blaze, with a busload of little children there to remind us just how high the stakes are.
There are times when the fiery landscape is staggering and times when it screams CG, but few directors can rev up a movie and keep it at a fever pitch the way Greengrass can. Everything is in motion: cars, buses, people running and especially the flames; it’s as visceral and breathless as a Bourne movie — if nowhere near as fun, because it really happened and because, as the fire chief says at a news conference, it keeps happening: “Every year the fires get bigger, and there are more of them. We’re being damn fools.”
(Anybody who’d come to Toronto from Los Angeles would no doubt think back to this January and agree.)
The film follows two stories at once: Kevin and Mary taking the children through an increasingly impassable hellscape, and also the efforts of the fire department to do something, anything, to contain the blaze — or, failing, at that, to rescue the people who are trapped.
But the main story is the bus with McConaghey and Ferrera, who spend most of their time smothered in smoke and darkness but still manage to find some touching notes in their characters, at least in the few moments to catch your breath when the frenetic pace slows down and James Newton Howard’s bold music trails off.
The Camp Fire has already been the subject of a number of worthy documentaries, including two named “Fire in Paradise” (one on Netflix and one on Frontline) along with Ron Howard’s “Rebuilding Paradise” and Lucy Walker’s “Bring Your Own Brigade.” But while “The Lost Bus” doesn’t feel as timely as those earlier nonfiction films, it finds a new way into the story and gives a master filmmaker a sobering way to showcase his formidable skills.
Apple Original Films will release “The Lost Bus” in theaters on Sept. 19 and on Apple TV+ on Oct. 3.