There’s a Laurel and Hardy quality about the two-man road crew in the Tribeca-premiered indie “Prince Avalanche,” at least initially. Alvin (Paul Rudd) is uptight, bossy, and superior; Lance (Emile Hirsch) is gormless, sheepish, and easily mystified. Alvin patronizes Lance, who oafishly rebels. They bicker and make up.
David Gordon Green’s affecting low-key buddy comedy (or is it a drama?) is set in rural central Texas in 1988, a year after a wildfire decimated 43,000 acres, killing four, according to the opening titles. Images of the conflagration segue into Alvin and Lance camping peacefully in the woods at night and then working, less harmoniously, at their backbreaking job of painting yellow lines and gumming reflectors on the region’s blacktops.
Based on the Icelandic film “Either Way“ (2011), the movie exudes the same Southern languor as Green’s “George Washington” (2000) and “All the Real Girls” (2003); the cinematographer Tim Orr brought a flat, naturalistic look to all three. Yet the strongest analogue is “Old Joy” (2006), Kelly Reichardt’s minimalist study of a 30-something father-to-be reuniting with an unsettled college friend on a camping trip in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Where the latter is deliberately atonal, “Prince Avalanche” undermines its affability with somber notes.
Alvin, who hired Lance for the summer gig, is the boyfriend of Lance’s sister, Madison, so the two are potential brothers-in-law. That they are already brothers-in-loserdom is emphasized by their wearing matching bib-and-brace overalls, like boat restorers Stan and Olly in “Towed in the Hole” (1932). It’s not the blue-collar uniform itself that suggests failure, of course, but the pair’s hapless demeanor when thus attired. They are like baby men — especially Hirsch, who but for the absence of an anarchic gleam might be mistaken for a post-adolescent Jack Black.
The two men’s opposing values — which gently, if inevitably, coalesce as their individual circumstances change — are primarily driven by their attitudes to women. Alvin is monogamous and sends money home to Madison, a stay-at-home single mother and poet (whom Lance thinks a user); his immediate dream is the German vacation they’ve talked about taking in the fall.
Lance’s dream is to get laid the coming weekend — preferably with a friend’s hot girlfriend he’s already made out with in a bathroom. As becomes clear, he has a habit of “trading down” if he can’t sleep with his first choice. Though not otherwise odious, he treats women selfishly and irresponsibly. The reassurance he needs from them can only be found in urban situations, so he’s ill-at-ease in the country (the character is the flipside of Hirsch’s obdurate outdoorsman, Christopher McCandless, in 2007’s “Into the Wild”).
Alvin, in contrast, loves being alone in nature, seemingly a rationalization of the unsociability that is harming his relationship with Madison. Though scarcely gloomy, Rudd’s performance makes one wish he’d one day play a major depressive.
Their agendas are challenged by the film’s only other speaking characters. Alvin comes across a spry but shaken old woman (Joyce Payne) scrabbling in the ashes where her house used to be. He gently tells her that her pilot license, which she’s looking for, was probably burned. Her admission of having lost her strength since the fire moves him, and his proud self-sufficiency starts to feel hollow.
A rogueish old truck driver (the late Lance LeGault), who shares his beer and spirits with the boys whenever he sees them, gets Lance alone when Alvin is in town. He counsels him not to risk developing feelings for a woman so he can stay free, yet his coarse advice sews in Lance a seed of doubt about its wisdom. In the cases of both Alvin and Lance, the dawning of new considerations about how to live among one’s fellow humans is tacit. Credit to Green for that, though the vandalism that results from their joint catharsis as newly bonded best buds trashes the reflective mood. It may save viewers who expected a dudes-in-the-woods gag-fest from falling asleep.
“Prince Avalanche” will be released in theaters August 9.