David Gordon Green explores devastation and
rebuilding on the scale of both a burnt out Texan forest and the fragile human
heart in this strange, funny and sincere film which marks the director’s long
awaited return to form.
As with Green’s early works we
find ourselves in an autumnal tinted rural America. Two road workers are tasked
with repainting the street lines following a devastating forest fire. Alvin (Paul
Rudd), a keen outdoors man and a hopeless romantic, is happy to work away and
keep the wages flowing back to the woman he loves. Lance (Emile Hirsch at his
most plump and likable yet), all youthful arrogance and naivety, is the brother
to Alvin’s love and it seems, clearly employed due to this. The pair start out
as chalk and cheese but trouble with women in both their lives gradually brings
the two men together. The homebrewed paint stripper of a local truck driver
helps to loosen their tongues until inevitably, a brotherly bond is formed. Green
isolates his characters in the landscape’s quiet beauty and charred remains, choosing
never to show us their lives outside the forest and leaving them to reveal it as
the film and their companionship develops.
All the Real Girls marked a great debut.
George Washington was even better. Since
then fans of Green’s work have only had the fun but frivolous Pineapple Express and the consistent
weirdness of Eastbound and Down to
keep hopes of a return alive. A run of big budget trash looked to spell the end
for the once promising director but Avalanche
represents a welcome return to form; a step back from the studios and a
step forward creatively; a step into stranger waters perhaps. Sure it might
seem easy to go low budget with friends like Paul Rudd to call upon but when an on-form David Gordon Green has final cut, there’s just no one out there who does it quite
like him. A director as adept with the strange way people relate
to each other as he is with the strange winds in the trees.
