Review: ‘Prince Avalanche,’ starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch

I don’t even know where to begin with this movie. THIS MOVIE. God, Prince Avalanche gave me a headache.

Maybe it’s because I’m not a man and I’m not a stoner, but director and writer David Gordon Green (who also helmed the good Pineapple Express and the abysmal Your Highness) has made an intolerable thing in Prince Avalanche. Loosely adapted from the Icelandic film Either Way, Prince Avalanche is a meandering, frustrating mess, similar to dialogue-heavy, existential films like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead but immeasurably less interesting. Starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as polar opposites working a summer job together and eventually growing to appreciate one another, the film never goes anywhere. It’s as stuck as its characters.

It’s 1987, and 43,000 acres in the western U.S. have been ruined by wildfires. A year later, in this blackened, gutted landscape is Alvin (Rudd), a self-important, mustachioed 30-something who considers himself a man of the wilderness. He gets up early, he hunts for food, he sleeps in a tent, he writes his girlfriend serious, overwrought letters about how much he loves her. And in stark contrast to his naturalism is Lance (Hirsch), his erstwhile girlfriend’s younger brother, stuck with Alvin for the summer. Together they’re painting traffic markings on roads running through areas abandoned after those blazes—a mix of untouched nature and torched houses. Sometimes they’ll see the bones of a home, its concrete foundations, and remember that where they’re stepping, other people used to live. These places were once someone’s homes—and their presence, their work at this seemingly menial task, is trespassing.

Sike! LOL, all that depth is stuff I just added to the narrative. Because if you want purpose, clear intent, or discernible emotional themes, you’re not getting them in Prince Avalanche.What you will get is Lance, with a body that was once muscular but is now a bit pudgy and with an unfortunately feathered hairdo, discussing fingering a girl he likes who just happens to be attached to one of his friends. And Alvin, narrating obnoxious letters to his girlfriend (clichéd lines include, “I can’t say I miss city life”). And the two of them fighting over what to listen to on their boombox, and about Alvin’s authority problem (he’s especially fond of saying things like, “You’re not the boss here. I’m the boss”), and about Lance’s laziness. You wouldn’t think 94 minutes could feel so long, but oh, they do.

Ultimately Prince Avalanche is dominated by two or three repetitive conversations that circle around the same themes but never get anywhere, never exhibit something deeper for the two men or how they relate to each other. The only thing they eventually have in common is unfaithful women who don’t appreciate them, and that’s such a simplistic and vaguely sexist reason for a friendship that I refuse to believe it would actually draw these two together. Two people who spend most of the movie at each other’s throats, sabotaging each other and bitching about practically everything, would suddenly become friends and forgive each other everything just because of a shared resentment of the opposite sex? Sure, that’s not reductive at all!

There are plot elements here that could be interesting but remain tantalizingly out of reach and indecipherable—a truck driver Lance and Alvin see a few times could be a figment of their imaginations, a woman they see walking through an abandoned home may not be there at all. Instead the entire film is focused on their idiotic conversations, on Alvin harrumphing his nerdiness all over the place (“I reap the rewards of solitude,” he sniffs) and Lance asking dumb things like “Are you really cool not getting laid all summer?” These aren’t characters; they’re caricatures. This isn’t a film; it’s a one-act high-school play. Feel free to leave Prince Avalanche flailing in the wilderness.

Rating: 0.5 out of 5 Guttenbergs