Prince Avalanche

       It’s tempting to call David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche a post-apocalypse bromance. But it’s rather a fable about men and their -- as the heroes’ song puts it -- “bad connections,” not just with women and each other but with themselves and reality. 

In contrast to the film’s Icelandic source, here the wasteland derives not from ice but from fire, the 1987 Texas forest blaze. When the apparently worldlier Alvin (Paul Rudd) and the apparently naive Lance (Emile Hirsch) work all week painting the centre lane lines on the highway, their function is to bring a slim sense of order to the charred and remote wilds. Their work starts promisingly enough. But when their respective love lives backfire and their tentative friendship explodes, they drunkenly run their line painter amok then dump their equipment. The next morning they proceed with no sign of remorse or loss.

Alvin is disconnected from his girl-friend Madison, Lance’s sister, though they exchange poetic letters  and he sends her cash. He makes no effort to phone or to visit her on the weekends. Instead he mincingly plays at sharing domesticity on the ruins of a burned out house. Worse, Alvin is disconnected from his disconnection, completely unaware of their increasing estrangement. He considers his German lessons make him superior to Lance with his boom box.

The blunter Lance has fewer illusions about Madison but is equally self-unaware when he plans to seduce his friend’s (perhaps ex-) girlfriend, then to score at a regional beauty pageant and -- in between --  to help a much older bedmate deal with her unexpected pregnancy. In parallel forms of onanism -- aka “self-sufficiency” -- Alvin pretends to be a strong outdoorsy man’s man and Lance a stud, but neither has a clear sense of themselves or the ability to deal with their inevitable disappointment.

The world can survive apocalypse. Hence the brief scenes of rustics sawing logs and children playing with chickens. After an inferno the human race stirs itself back to life. In the microcosm, so do the young men. Their romantic hopes dashed they set off with a new friendship -- based on their own interaction not Madison’s connection -- but not with new insight or self-awareness They share the macho reflex illusion: the fools gold promise of that beauty pageant.

Two older figures confirm the film’s sense of fable. A boisterous trucker lauds the lads’ work, provides them with moonshine and warns them not to bed a woman more than three times lest they succumb to “feelings.” An older German woman rakes through the ashes of her burned out home and strolls the fields spectrally. She seems as unreal as Madison. The two older figures don’t connect to each other even when they appear in the same truck. They seem to embody the film’s sense of alternative reality, as also imaged in the black and white footage and in the shots in which speed melts together the separate lane lines.

The film begins like a road version of Godot but when it dwindles into buddy comedy it falls short of Beckett’s clarity.