Prince Avalanche

All hope was lost for David Gordon Green. After a string of cult-ready indie flicks, he sold out in the best possible way and made the hilarious Pineapple Express. I hoped it was a one off, or at least, that he would remain good at comedy. But the disappointing Your Highness and the 'I- can't-even-bear-to-look-at-its-IMDb-page' The Sitter don't look too promising for his future. Now with Prince Avalanche, it seems like he's taken a good look at himself and realized what he does best. Small scale dramas concerning the human condition, especially regarding romantic relationships. I always love good films about little-thought of jobs and the guys who do the line painting of the roads in the middle of nowhere is a fascinating one. Prince Avalanche is a dual character study of an introvert and an extrovert but goes beyond the 'odd couple' clichés. Together, they cover enough ground to find relatable areas, and with dialogue-driven scenes, it cuts to the core of what they live for and how that drive changes and grows throughout the course of the film.

Paul Rudd is absolutely outstanding here. I'm so glad he's finally found a role to test his dramatic talent without having to ignore his brand of comedy, though much of the humour of this film is incidental and sparse. He's incredibly subtle and commanding. Unfortunately, Emile Hirsch looks amateur next to Rudd and he rarely feels as sincere. Sometimes the little conflicts between them suffer because of it which make the film feel slower than it is, but they still drive the character development in an interesting way. Rudd aside, the highlight of the film is the great cinematography. Sometimes the cutaways and montages are more emotionally engaging than the words as they think of all the symbols possible in this environment with these characters. It's a film that conjures a mood more than anything and it reassures me that David Gordon Green never left, he was just taking a break. I regret that I've more or less forgotten what happens in his first four films but Avalanche makes me want to revisit them soon. It's a beautiful simple film which ends on a lovely hopeful note. A true catharsis from the social order of life and utterly refreshing to watch.

8/10

I enjoyed seeing Prince Avalanche at SXSW Film Festival. It is a peculiar and deceptively simple story of two highway workers in an isolated area painting the line down the middle of a new highway. The setting becomes a character as this low-budget movie was filmed in Bastrop, Texas last summer in the aftermath of the recent fires. Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch are really magnificent. Rudd is actually difficult to recognize and comes off so different than he often does in his straight comedy roles. This is a dialogue-driven film that in some ways seems a bit like a stage play. The dialogue and the relationship between the two leads drives the entire film. The film nicely merges the comedic nature of both of the ridiculous characters with the serious nature of the issues that they are dealing with in their personal lives. The film is far lighter than Rudd's recent turn in deathly dark Killer Joe, but somewhat more serious than Rudd's big budget film This is 40. While this sort of small-budget film is unlikely to get widespread distribution it really showcases the talents of both of these actors and the importance of good writing and a beautiful setting.

"You tried kill yourself by jumping off a 12 foot cliff?" (Lance to Alvin)

I'm a sucker for minimalism and absurdism, the kind Samuel Beckett and Jerry Seinfeld make their own: terse dialogue about nothing that somehow elicits humor and becomes something deeper with thoughts about life, loss, and hope.

Writer-director David Gordon Green has crafted a simple bromatic morality tale of two guys painting road lines in 1988 after a forest fire near Austin, Texas. The purged, scorched landscape of the ravaged but beautiful Bastrop State Park serves as metaphor for the men/boys' cleansing journey marching toward a renewed life. One critic calls it "broken people in a broken forest."

The larger concerns of the film, which is episodic with love and loss overlaying the quotidian activities of painting road lines, are manifold: In Alvin's (Paul Rudd) case, how can he keep his lover, Madison, when he is absent and really has little to offer? In Lance's (EmileHirsch) life, how can he mature enough to deal with the heartbreak his sister is causing Alvin by breaking up with him. Alvin and Lance's conversation lightly brushes the issue of their relationship with women, but in simple lives, this issue is grand and well accounted for by Green's spare dialogue: "Can we enjoy the silence?"

As in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, where the characters are trying "to hold the terrible silence at bay," nothing like God or illumination is arriving, just an old man (Lance LeGault) driving a truck with some moonshine and pithy life advice.

As the road lines and the drink proliferate, issues for the three men emerge having to do with their relationships with women. The ingenious part is to make what the truck driver says and does echo the very heart of the conflicts with the two line painters.

So Prince Avalanche (a title Green admits makes little sense but could reflect the absurdist atmosphere, wherein they are lords of chaos at best) is also about nothing because nothing is happening while life-defining relationships are lying underneath. As with Hemingway, the spare story asks you to consider if the bell is tolling for just these three loners, or is it tolling for you, too?

You don't need to be a Prince who causes Avalanches to see that the issues of love and women do amount to a hill of beans for each little male life. Simplicity trumps complexity once again.

A story about two men working on motorway maintenance. That's it. From the opening to closing scene we are presented with a series of interchanges of these two guys working the asphalt. One might rush to assume that it probably is a dull experience but in truth it was far from it.

There was something about the realism and humanity of the interaction that would maintain the audience's attention and engagement. Slowly, we became part of the ordinary lives of these two men and our interest in their dealings with one another only increased and thus making this a largely unnoticed gem.

The original film, "Á annan veg," was a nice surprise when I discovered and watched it during a red-eye flight with IcelandAir. I had never heard of it before, so even in Iceland, it's quite obscure, so I found it a little weird that it was being remade in Hollywood.

This remake is in most parts a carbon-copy of the original with the Icelandic dialog translated into English, but that's not really a bad thing. It's interesting to see the story in a different, but eerily the exact same, place.

There are really only three characters in the whole movie: the adult man, the young man and the truck driver. I prefer Paul Rudd to most actors any day of the week, so he wins, and Emile Hirsch was fine as the young man; however, I kinda liked the truck driver better in the original version, because there, he had this strange "I surely am a sex offender" vibe, which is lacking here. It just gave him a little more personality.

All in all, a good watch. Simple story, but interesting and slightly better than the original because of the Rudd-factor.