Prince Avalanche

2013 comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Following devastating wildfires in Texas, a road worker and his girlfriend's brother get to work repainting yellow lines on the road.

First, I want to get this out of the way: Paul Rudd could easily play Oates in a Hall and Oates biopic assuming that Oates is the one whom I'm thinking about. Oates has the mustache, right? And he really should because a Hall and Oates biopic would be absolutely amazing.

You can tell this is an independent film because of how many scenes involve the two characters camping or working. It might be a quarter of the movie. This sometimes feels like a more briskly-paced Gerry except there's a more of a quiet slapstick and humorous awkwardness with the characters' relationship. Here's a piece of dialogue that occurs after the characters have had a fight ending with Paul Rudd's character jumping or falling off a "cliff" and injuring himself:

Alvin: I don't know what I was doing. I feel like such a fool. I was running, and I reached the cliff, and all I know is that I either wanted to fly or kill myself."
Lance: Kill yourself by jumping off a twelve-foot cliff?
Alvin: Sometimes I can do things that can't really happen.
Lance: What does that mean?
Alvin: I'm impossible.

I love that! When the characters do communicate, the interactions seem straight out of the Theater of the Absurd school of drama. Rudd always plays awkward really well; he's sort of making a career of it actually. Emile Hirsh is also good, quite naturally butchering the English language with meandering stories and half-thunk aspirations and dreams. Their nasty rapport makes for uncomfortable comical conflict. Rudd actually says "I could beat you up" at one point, following it with a bicep flex and a flee through the woods when Hirsch grabs for a large crescent wrench. A weird chase that follows involves war paint and a whoop. Hirsch gets an awkward masturbation scene while Rudd shows off his dance moves in what has to be the gayest fishing scene in any movie I've ever seen. Anyway, they both play "loser" really well, and their deliveries and comic timing is about perfect.

But although the movie is often funny, it's more than just a comedy. No, this is also a ghost story. Or maybe it's a time travel story. Really, I don't know what else is going on, but there's a strange vibe that makes you wonder if there's something ethereal or otherworldly about either some of the characters or maybe all of the characters in this. And it gives the movie a layer of tired sadness on top the madcappery. And that's exactly how I like my comedies--sad. Text at the beginning preceding shots of a wildfire tell us that four lives were lost, and there are really only four characters in this thing if you don't count some waving children at the very end. Are they all dead? You've got the titular avalanche (I think--Alvin + Lance = Avalanche?), a trucker named Moses played the late Lance LeGault--sadly, this was his final movie--who says cool things like "You're hopeless as tits on a boarhog," and an old lady looking for her pilot's license in the ashes of a burned house. The latter is in the truck with Moses a few times, but he doesn't acknowledge her and even claims not to see her. She refers to "digging in [her] own ashes" to Rudd's character and claims that "everything's past tense now." Rudd's lips don't move during a lot of the conversation he engages in with her. It all makes you wonder what is really going on with these characters long after the movie's ended. Are they ghosts? Are Lance, Alvin, and Moses representations of the same guy? If so, middle-aged Alvin's words to Lance, his younger self, that he "quite literally could amount to nothing" certainly seem sadder. I wish I would have figured out that there was something else going on with all this earlier so that I could watch out for more clues.

There's a remarkable scene with a long shot of Rudd and Hirsch approaching their little truck and opening a door. One of them says something about birds, and three (I think) doves fly out of the vehicle. The remarkable thing is that one of them flies straight into the camera. Accidental beauty? Well-trained doves?

All in all, another movie that I'm not smart enough to understand but ended up really liking.