The film is a remake of the Icelandic film Either Way by director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurosson and Green has transported his characters to America but kept the 1980’s setting.  Speaking at the press conference Green said that he had considered updating the time the film was set in but he felt this would have obstructed the sense of isolation that he was seeking. 

He said: “I wanted to put it back to when times were more pleasant, when the music was better.  Today the characters would have been contacting their loved ones on their cell phones and SKYPING on their ipads.”

Green said that the project originated with the fire devastated Texas landscape where the film is set.  After visiting the forests where massive devastation was caused a few years ago by forest fires he wanted to use the devastation and rebirth of nature as a character in the film.  Speaking at the press conference he said that he found that Either Way was a perfect blueprint for what he wanted to do.  The film had the sense of recreation and regeneration that he was looking for and he felt that he could also make it very personal.

DoP Tim Orr who is a regular collaborator with Green has captured the poetic and expressionistic sense of the devastated landscape with majestic shots that contrast with the down to earth characters in this buddy road movie.  Green said he had shot the film on a digital Alexa camera because he wanted a sense of a curious camera that could go wandering after the characters and that would be curious about the landscape. 

The film could almost be a two-hander theatre piece and the performances of Paul Rudd as the thoughtful Alvin who enjoys is isolated work seeing it as an opportunity for reflection and Emile Hirsch as the directionless Lance who looks on the monotonous summer job as a penance form the central core of the film.  

Lance thinks only of his weekends off when he hopes to get laid in the town while Alvin writes soulful letters to his girlfriend about his experiences in the desolate forest.  Alvin like to hunt for derelict houses and ghosts in the forest and at one point encounters a woman who presumably used to live there who is digging through the ashes searching for something tangible from her lost life.  The encounter is eerie and we are left wondering if the woman was real or the ghost of someone who perished in the fire.

The conversations between the two men are both comic and poetic and while final booze-up and fight that forms the conclusion of the film and brings the two men closer together is predictable Green does it very well and it has a real impact.

Prince Avalanche follows on from Green’s 2008 film Pineapple Express and is a worthy successor.

 

Credits:

Director: David Gordon Green
USA 2013
Cast: Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch