(Via).
At this point, pretty much anything anyone writes about director David Gordon Green sets out to divide his early “promising” work—impressionistic, Malick-beholden films like All the Real Girls and George Washington—from more recent stoner comedies like Pineapple Express, the much-vilified-now-but-future-cult-classic Your Highness, and Green’s work on Eastbound & Down.
The critical line on Green’s latest film, Prince Avalanche, is that it synthesizes the poetic and artistic impulses of the earlier films with the commercial comedy of what came after—that, in short, Green has found his way again. I don’t think that this is especially true.
Based on the 2011 Icelandic film Either Way, Prince Avalanche floats around the barest wisp of a plot. It’s the end of the 1980s, and in the middle of wildfire-ravaged Texas, uptight Alvin (Paul Rudd) and slacker Lance (Emile Hirsch, channeling a sensitive Jack Black) paint yellow lines on the old rural roads and hammer in new signposts. They squabble, share vodka with an alcoholic truck driver, and encounter a woman whose house has burned down. We learn that Lance has scored the job because his sister is Alvin’s girlfriend—but that romantic relationship looks pretty rocky from the get-go.
Prince Avalanche is never better than its opening scenes, where Alvin and Lance wordlessly perform their duties, hammering stakes into the ground and measuring out yellow dashes. Green is confident enough to let the camera linger on his actors, and most of the memorable scenes are simple—Paul Rudd’s motions as he sets up a folding table, or Hirsch tying down equipment to the work jeep. The blasted Texas forest is beautiful, as new growth mixes with charred tree trunks in frames by turns surreal and painterly.
The story line of Prince Avalanche isn’t especially bad; it’s just not especially good, or even interesting. There’s simply too much indie dramedy quirkiness going on here, and when Green’s plotting hits familiar arc-driven beats—a climactic fight, a scene of drunken abandon—the story feels false against the pure, beautiful cinematography. The original score by postrockers Explosions in the Sky is maddeningly intrusive, buzzing with overly-detailed blips and rhythm huffs that sound at times like Tangerine Dream’s work on Risky Business. Calm down!
This is all perhaps a way of saying that the “synthesis” many critics have detected in Prince Avalanche is not particularly satisfying. It’s true that the film is smaller and more intimate than Green’s last effort, the execrable and indefensible into-the-night film The Sitter, but Prince Avalanche is just as much a product of formula as that film.
In most of his films, Green retells the same core story about a lonely young man with communication troubles who really just wants a friend (this is Paul Schneider in All the Real Girls or James Franco in Pineapple Express or Danny McBride in Your Highness). Prince Avalanche is no different, but it seems unsure of pulling off its emotional impact without all the indie-quirk baggage. It feels bloated at a scant 96 minutes and would be a far better film if, like the burned and beautiful world it depicts, it was willing to strip away more of its protective layers. (It doesn’t help that Kelly Reichardt told a similar story far better in 2006 with her film Old Joy).
Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the film—I’ll confess I wanted it to be great, something that could transcend the self-seriousness of All the Real Girls and surpass the final, perfect diner scene of Pineapple Express (the single moment where Green best combines his Malick-tinged naturalism with his sense of bromance-up-too-late humor).
Of course I could be dead wrong—I might catch the film on cable in a year and see something there that I missed the first time. Like most viewers, I had no love for Your Highness on first viewing but have since sat through it at least four times—it’s a failure, to be sure, but a compelling, bizarre failure, one that I find funnier and more self-aware each time. And the same promise that Green has always shown in all his work (okay, not The Sitter) shines brightly throughout Prince Avalanche. The final shot of the film shows us children joyfully chasing a chicken. It’s one of the finest moments in the film, and I wish Green’s lens lingered there longer—I’d like to see what happens next.
IT WAS MIDAPRIL, Carnevale had been over for weeks, and Lent was coming to a close, skies too drawn and pallid to weep for the fate of the cyclic Christ, the city having slowly regained a maskless condition, with a strange dull shine on the paving of the Piazza, less a reflection of the sky than a soft glow from regions below. But the silent communion of masks was not quite done here.
On one of the outer islands in the Lagoon, which had belonged to the Spongiatosta family for centuries, over an hour away even by motor craft, stood a slowly drowning palazzo. Here at midnight between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday began the secret counter-Carnevale known as Carnesalve, not a farewell but an enthusiastic welcome to flesh in all its promise. As object of desire, as food, as temple, as gateway to conditions beyond immediate knowledge.
With no interference from authority, church or civic, all this bounded world here succumbed to a masked imperative, all hold on verbatim identities loosening until lost altogether in the delirium. Eventually, after a day or two, there would emerge the certainty that there had always existed separately a world in which masks were the real, everyday faces, faces with their own rules of expression, which knew and understand one another—a secret life of Masks. It was not quite the same as during Carnevale, when civilians were allowed to pretend to be members of the Maskworld, to borrow some of that hieratic distance, that deeper intimacy with the unexpressed dreams of Masks. At Carnevale, masks had suggested a privileged indifference to the world of flesh, which one was after all bidding farewell to. But here at Carnesalve, as in espionage, or some revolutionary project, the Mask’s desire was to be invisible, unthreatening, transparent yet mercilessly deceptive, as beneath its dark authority danger ruled and all was transgressed.
1. Okay—I know it’s been like forever since I riffed on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (here, “forever” = a few weeks), but I took a week off from the novel, which turned into two weeks, which is a bad habit, yes, but here we are, and I’m nearing the end of the shaggy beast. I don’t think Pynchon is going to tie all the loose threads into some perfect picture for me, but I don’t think I’d want that anyway.
2. Where I am in the book: Cyprian, Cyprian, Cyprian. The beginning of The Great War. Just waaaaaay too much going on to even bother to begin to try to summarize.
3. Cyprian is surely the most fascinating character of Against the Day, but his somewhat late arrival in the text feels, I don’t know, lumpy or something. Something about reading such a long book—we make a kind of investment in certain plots, figures, characters, and Pynchon here sort of moves them into the background, or disappears them completely, for long, long stretches. I’m thinking about The Chums of Chance in particular, but also Lew Basnight, the Tunguska event, the Vibes vs. the Traverses, etc. Thematically it’s all there, but this stretch with Cyprian’s dark adventures, while fantastic, also feels almost like a novella shoehorned into the final chapters of an epic. This is not a complaint.
4. I’ve shared a few citations from Against the Day since my last riff, but the one above (my Kindle tells me its at the 82% mark, if that means anything to you) seems to resonate with what I take to be the major themes and motifs of the novel.
I’m thinking specifically of the final line: “But here at Carnesalve, as in espionage, or some revolutionary project, the Mask’s desire was to be invisible, unthreatening, transparent yet mercilessly deceptive, as beneath its dark authority danger ruled and all was transgressed.”
Invisible is obviously a key word in Against the Day, and the novel turns on concepts of doubling, masking, transgression, themes that the Carnevale-Carnesalve disjunction highlights (flesh vs. spirit, visible vs. invisible, etc.).
5. Actually, now that I think about it, Cyprian probably most embodies, or, rather, embodies most complexly, Pynchon’s themes of doubling, masking, and transgression. He’s his own doppelganger. (Even the name suggest a kind of bilocation — Cyprus, that ancient crossroads of East and West).
6. And —
The Carnesalve chapter culminates in a truly salacious sex scene, an S&M-fueled ménage à trois that somehow simultaneously punctures the novels structure of doubling (cause, uh, a three-way) at the same time it reinforces it (Cyprian as self-double). I’m not sure if any of this that I’m saying makes any sense at all.
7. The image at the top of this riff is a detail from The Fight Between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Bruegel.
Biblioklept 