Directed by David Gordon Green
Starring Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsh, Lance LeGault, Joyce Payne
Comedy, Drama
94 Mins
R
To get a grasp on what exactly makes Prince Avalanche so bad, first comprehend what it could have been. The combination of director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express), Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch screams comedy gold. Even the trailer presented this as a quirky comedy about two offbeat guys doing goofy things - nothing could be more misleading.
In reality, this is the story of Alvin (Rudd) and Lance (Hirsh) - two strange, moody, unlikable blue-collar workers who do the most boring job in the world: hammer posts into the side of the road. How do I know it's the most boring job in the world? Because Green spends a good tenth of his movie showing us just exactly how boring it is to hammer in post after post on the side of the goddamn road. But does this make good filmmaking? Do I even have to tell you "no"?
Living together out of a tent in the woods, they run into weird situations like Hirsh beating off in the middle of the night and Lance getting dumped via snail mail and getting super-duper bummed about it. While events like these and the Odd Couple-in-the-woods living situation could make for good comedy beats, every attempt at comedy is eyebrow raising and wildly disappointing. It's awkward in all the wrong ways and excuses this faltering comedy with attempts to "get deep". An unnamed truck driver (Lance LeGault) gets a slight raise from the corner of the lip, but that's the extent of our comedic enjoyment in a film that's as confused as a Saturday night bag-lady and as funny as watching Grandma die.
More important, and more devastating, than the misfired attempts at comedy, is the lacking sense of fluidity between events and total absence of any driving sense of stakes. Without either, the film never even stood a chance at getting us the least bit invested in the trials and tribulations of these characters. If anything, we can't stand them.
Lance is off-putting and childish and Alvin is a solitary type who seems to be slipping off his rocker in the most introverted and banal of ways. A moment where Alvin finds an abandoned house in the woods and goes about an impromptu game of "house" is most likely the moment where it all starts to come undone. A random elderly woman wanders into the scene (a local who was in no way a part of the production nor a character scripted in the story) and becomes a focal point for what seems like a lifetime, but is probably about five minutes. As this complete sidetracking indicates, there is simply no importance to anything. Instead, everything Green does feels as trivial as an extended Vine video. There's no connective tissue, no fibers linking one scene to the next, and the backbone, if there even is one, is so bent with scoliosis that the only humane option is to put it to a long and wakeless sleep.
With a production schedule that only lasted a few weeks, it's clear that little prep work was involved in storyboarding as well as with the performances, which come off as hackneyed and adolescent. Being immature and acting immature are two separate entities - one that Green, Hirsch and Rudd fail to delineate here. You don't go to a playground to watch kids run around and yell at each other for fun much like you don't go to the movies to watch actors saunter and tear around like children. You go to experience character, to be sucked into a story, to feel something. Prince Avalanche fails on all counts.
With the appeal of watching a book mildew, the film is basically to adults what Where the Wild Things Are was to children - confusing, stilted and just plain, off. Don't take that as an attack on Where the Wild Things Are, just a well-deserved critique that that movie was very clearly not meant for kids. The dark themes and tragic, mature elements went over their heads and the meaning was lost on that younger generation. This, similarly, takes aim at an intended audience (adults in this case) and misses wildly. If anything, this is a movie for kids. But even more so, it seems like a film made for none. If you are however interested in good actors performing poorly, not doing anything of interest and then doing a lot more of nothing, than this is most surely the film for you.
I don't doubt there will be droves of art-film enthusiasts lining up to put in their two-cent defense of Green's latest but I can't foresee any conclusion that would sway my strong distaste for this dead-on-arrival "film". It's the worst case scenario of "artsiness" and someone has to hold art film's feet to the fire when they fail... and fail this one has. Green proves that being both smug and dull are a lethal combination and results in a film that I, for one, couldn't wait to end.
