Green: Prince Avalanche (2013)

Over the first part of his career, David Gordon Green perfected a vision of the American South that was equal parts pastoral and post-apocalyptic. All his characters seemed to exist in a vacuum that was determined by catastrophe but somehow oblivious or immune to it - a space that tended to work against most of the tropes and tendencies of Southern Gothic while still remaining enthralled by them. Prince Avalanche is very much a return to that mode – it was actually inspired by a massive environmental catastrophe, the Bastrop County Complex Fire, which decimated one of Texas’ most iconic national parks, and prompted the post-rock band Explosions In The Sky to contact Green and suggest they make a movie about it. As that might suggest, great swathes of the film play like a post-rock video – and, since the sweeping, widescreen instrumentals of post-rock often feel like films in filigree, that’s a pretty natural fit. With such a clear return to Green’s earlier output, then, it’s a bit surprising to find a narrative that’s drawn straight from his recent trio of stoner comedies – we might be back among the landscapes of George Washington, or All The Real Girls, but the characters are more akin to those of Your Highness, or even The Sitter. In that sense it feels a bit like an existentialist bromance – Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch play a pair of characters commissioned to repaint the roads snaking through the park, during which they discurse about women, love, life and the future. There’s a certain camaraderie, but the rest of the world feels too distant, too decimated, for their words to really resonate or echo. Watching it is like being a privy to a conversation that falls on deaf ears, full of unexpected tonal shudders and strange correspondances – it makes you realise how rare it is to hear someone talk without the total conviction of an audience. That makes the conversations feel quite fragile, at risk of falling in on themselves, as well as recovering something quite intimate and innocent about apocalypse – as crude and unlikeable as these characters are, they’re possibly the last people on earth, and that gives them a kind of grace, even if they don’t quite know what to do with it.