These early scenes are pleasant yet tense because we know what sort of movie this is—a male bonding drama that must eventually erupt into pained confrontation. When the confrontations arrive, though, the pain doesn't feel like an obligatory story beat, because we've grown to know and love these characters.
At first this seems very much a mentor-pupil sort of relationship, with Rudd's Alvin as the steady, smart, capable family man, and Hirsch's Lance as the city kid who can't stand being out in nature for longer than a few hours. The film's writer and director David Gordon Green adapted this movie from the 2011 Icelandic drama "Either Way," and there's a touch of European style intimate-splendor to it. Swaths of flaming trees evoke the opening montage of "Apocalypse Now." There are images of burros grazing on wildflowers, a bird pinwheeling above a line of trees, a green caterpillar inching over the top of a mossy log, yellow paint spilling into a stony riverbed, and so forth. The original score, by Explosions in the Sky, creates a trancelike feel, occasionally pushing too hard, to the point where it feels as though you're watching the dollar-store version of "Koyaanisquatsi."
But most of the picture has a contemplative, at times deliberately pokey groove. There may in fact not be quite enough story to support a feature—Green told RogerEbert.com's Simon Abrams that the shooting script ran about 65 pages—but this is clearly not one of those films that loses sleep over whether every second is propulsive. In fact a large part of its worth lies in how opposed it is to the values that modern commercial films tend to prize.
This is the sort of movie that lets its two main characters spend their first few screen minutes waking up from an overnight camp, trudging uphill towards pink dawn light with shovels on their shoulders, laying yellow paint-lines on pavement, and so forth, while saying barely a word. The film reveals character through nonverbal details of gesture, framing and production design (such as when the paint-striper rolls out of frame, followed by Lance's road-crew-inappropriate brown suede shoes).
There's banter about the men's "equal time boombox agreement" and chatter that reveals backstory. We get the sense that Alvin's out here not in spite of his home situation, but because of it, and that Lance is neither the freewheeling stud nor the lazy lout that Alvin seems to think he is. Lance knows things about Alvin's wife (Lance's sister) that are better left unspoken, not because they reflect poorly on her, but because addressing them might puncture Alvin's image of himself. Lance has his own blind spots. His constant droning about his pickup artistry is annoying, then pathetic, then oddly charming, because it clearly doesn't match up with who he actually is. (When he tells Alvin he's going to try his luck at a beauty pageant because he's got "like, an eighty to ninety percent success rate at those places," Alvin replies, "Somehow, in your mind, you truly do perceive yourself as a gentleman.")
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