**½/****
starring Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch
screenplay by David Gordon Green, based on the film Either Way by Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson
directed by David Gordon Green
by Angelo Muredda The
standard line out of Sundance on Prince Avalanche, David Gordon Green's
tragicomic stop between the puerility of The Sitter and the Southern
Gothic of his upcoming Joe, was that it was a return to form after some
time spent in the wilderness. That's true enough insofar as its dashed-off
buddy travelogue, a loose adaptation of the Icelandic movie Either Way,
is sweet where The Sitter is cynical, but one has to wonder at this
point whether any of Green's studio trifles can be considered outliers when their worldview
is so consistent with the ostensible real deals. Even the least of his films
shares a thematic interest with the others in redeeming wayward losers; by that
token, Prince Avalanche isn't a triumphant comeback so much as a familiar
motif recapitulated in a more pleasant, minor key.
The
targets of Green's sympathetic energies this time are stoic, good-natured Alvin
(Paul Rudd) and his girlfriend's overconfident dunce brother, Lance (Emile
Hirsch). The two men are an odd couple, tasked with spending the summer of 1988
together painting over faded traffic lines on a Texas highway that's just been
scorched by wildfires. That disaster, we find out in a horrific documentary
set-up, displaced a good portion of the most impoverished locals, many of whom
amble by the leads in a daze throughout, rifling through their damaged property
as if waiting for a script to tell them where to go.
If the
repetitive, stultifying labour of our dunderheaded protagonists doesn't do the
job, the aimless improv of those nonprofessional bit players is surely meant to
tell us we're in Waiting for Godot territory, a hell from which there's
no exit. Where Beckett is committed to Vladimir and Estragon's terrible lot,
though, stripping them to their basest selves and leaving them out in the open
to dry, Green waffles, insisting on safely guiding his leads if not back home
then to somewhere they'll be appreciated. That mushy humanism is tough to
square with the film's loaded historical context–its evocation of the
precarious lives of those who survived the Bastrop County Complex fire of 2011,
which levelled over 1000 homes and resulted in at least two casualties.
Although
Green never really left this thematic territory of emotionally-arrested male
friends even in stoner comedies like Pineapple Express, Prince
Avalanche is a literal homecoming in the sense that it comes back to the
impoverished rural settings of his earlier work. Cinematographer Tim Orr
shoots the hell out of Bastrop, Texas, finding an off-key lyricism in every
muted splash of yellow paint and every heap of ash that used to be a home.
Their visual sensitivity extends to absurd touches like the men's matching
overalls, a Super Mario Bros. joke driven home by Rudd's bushy Luigi moustache. Yet for all those small pleasures, the
cumulative effect is pretty flat. Alvin and Lance are likable enough, and it's
nice to see Rudd giving up his Jack Lemmon routine of late to portray a slightly
less affable, more inscrutable kind of guy, but he doesn't have a lot of notes
to play beyond strait-laced frustration. Hirsch is fine, too, though Lance is
little more than a foil, a guy you're supposed to root for to grow up once the
movie's done, but no sooner. Green's good intentions aside, the locals are
foils, too, salt-of-the-earth people whose authentic lives are meant to enlarge
our view of a troubled patch of land we otherwise only see one dash of
paint at a time. While their story is surely more interesting than Alvin's and Lance's, you get the sense Green doesn't feel worthy of telling it.
