‘Prince Avalanche’ takes a humorous stroll down melancholy road.
Adapted loosely from the Iceland film, Either Way, Prince Avalanche is a sad, yet, somehow, delightful tale of unlikely friends connecting in an equally unlikely setting. Alvin and Lance are spending the summer of 1988 re-painting traffic lines on a Texas highway that winds through a burnt out forest. Their job is repetitive and tiresome, and takes an extraordinary amount of patience to adapt to the disconnect from city life and nearly all social/romantic interactions. There is a lot of isolation in Prince Avalanche, from within the characters, to the landscape in which they work and pine, yet the film is light and inviting thanks to the humor elicited from a charming script and powerful performances by the two leads.