David Gordon Green is back in arthouse form with the lovely and effervescent Prince Avalanche, a methodically paced, gorgeously shot buddy/road trip/ghost story loosely adapted from the Icelandic film Either Way. Alvin (Paul Rudd) and Lance (Emile Hirsch) are stuck out in the middle of nowhere, living out of their tent and highway maintenance truck as they wend their way slowly down an endless ribbon of stagnant highway, methodically painting yellow line after yellow line in a hypnotic rhythm, interspersed with a staccato bang, bang, bang as they hammer metal poles with reflectors alongside the highway, marking their path as they go.

They make an odd couple. Alvin, who fancies himself to be smarter and therefore better than the rather dense Lance, studies German on audiotapes, blaring his lessons from an giant boombox as they work, while Lance complains that it’s putting him to sleep. Alvin’s self-righteously set on self-improvement and study; he’s a bookish, reclusive sort of guy, and he’s using this job at least in part, it seems, as a justified way of having space and solitude from his stagnant relationship with his girlfriend, Lance’s sister. Lance, on the other hand, aspires to neither big thoughts nor big dreams, and finds the endless stretches of quiet and loneliness, with no one but Alvin for company, to be excruciatingly dull. Lance’s tastes are simple: he likes beer, comic books, loud music, hot chicks, and “getting the little man squeezed.” He only has this job because Alvin is doing his girlfriend a favor – and perhaps because it makes Alvin feel important to be able to impart his own brand of knowledge and wisdom onto this guy he perceives to be beneath himself. With Lance, Alvin can play the role of mentor — a role, one suspects, that he otherwise has few opportunities to play.

The one thing that breaks up the dull routine is the semi-regular appearance of a crusty old character driving another truck around the area, who stops by periodically to offer sage advice, humor and bottles of moonshine to help the time slip past faster. Along the way, the film veers slightly off the lane of odd couple buddy film and into a ghost story of sorts, when Alvin encounters an old woman sifting through the rubble of her burned-to-the-ground house. “Sometimes I feel like I’m digging through the ashes of my life,” she tells him – but whether that sad and lovely line refers to her or to Alvin is left for us to sort out. Later on, Alvin and Lance see the woman get into the old man’s truck, but he denies that anyone is there. Is she a ghost? Are they both?

There is humor here, but of the gentle, nudging, self-aware kind more than broad slapstick, save for one scene toward the end that injects a quick dose of mostly painless comic relief. But mostly there is an excavation of character going on here, as Alvin sorts and sifts through his own understanding of who he is and his place in the world. A letter for Alvin forces him to reassess things he thought he knew, causing him to dig through his own ashes in search of the answers to where he’s veered off track. A confrontation with Lance further shakes things up for him, shattering his view of himself as the one who has it all together.

Prince Avalanche was shot in Bastrop State Park in central Texas not long after wildfires devastated the area, and blackened, fallen trees and road kill create an interesting visual juxtaposition against tentative new growth, evoking a cycle of life and death, destruction and new birth. The color yellow appears symbolically throughout, from the bright yellow paint used to paint fresh dividing lines on old asphalt to equally bright wildflowers sprouting up out of ashes and charred remains of trees. Green is working less in the territory of non-stop-laughs bromance (and thank goodness for that) and back to working more in the artsy realm of the calm and quiet, the metaphoric and visually evocative. And working with the beautiful and poetic, for me, is exactly where this often brilliant, sometimes frustrating filmmaker belongs.

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