PRINCE AVALANCHE – The Review

Director David Gordon Green’s endearing and offbeat comedy/drama PRINCE AVALANCHE is a remake of the 2011 Icelandic film EITHER WAY. It’s about two men, Alvin and Lance (Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsh) who paint traffic lines and install reflector poles on scorched Texas back roads. Lance is in his early 20’s and obsessed with getting laid while Alvin is older, far more hardworking and conservative in his outlook on life. The pair walk and walk and walk, spraying paint and pounding poles. They push a wheelbarrow and drive a tiny truck. Sometimes Lance listens to hard rock music on the radio (it takes place in 1987) while other times Alvin listens to German language instruction tapes to prepare for an upcoming trip. Occasionally they speak to each other, mostly about Alvin’s girlfriend back home who happens to be Lance’s sister. Against this stark setting, the men, who have little in common, bicker and joke with each other, eventually developing a friendship. PRINCE AVALANCHE is essentially a two character play with an occasional addition. They meet a truck driver who shares some booze and a sad old woman who may or may not be a ghost. There, I’ve gone and given away the plot.

Anchored by a clever script and winning performances from Rudd and a bloated Hirsch (he looks like Jack Black!), PRINCE AVALANCHE is well worth a look. In this simple setting, Green provides a reasonable selection of drama and conflict for the bored workers, and just enough ideas for them to contemplate and argue about. However if your comfort zone sits around the ‘Hollywood standard’ where there’s a 5 camera shoot for every scene with 3 second cuts between shots and a suspenseful default score to keep you ‘on your seat’, then you’ll be pleasantly appalled. But I enjoyed it. I like how Green lets your mind wander. I like how PRINCE AVALANCHE relates real people. I can completely picture a couple of my friends carrying on the same conversations, walking along silently, or finishing a half told story days later. Nothing is pushed in your face except maybe the ‘as-is’ quality of it all. Green, better known for comedies like PINEAPPLE EXPRESS and THE SITTER, lets it grow and lets you see it all. Meditative, introspective, and at times profound, PRINCE AVALANCHE features a great score by Explosions in the Sky and is strikingly photographed by Tim Orr. PRINCE AVALANCHE meanders, but by the end of the movie you know that you’ve been somewhere.

3 1/2 of 5 Stars

PRINCE AVALANCHE opens in St. Louis Friday August 16th at Landmark’s The Tivoli Theater