An uneasy mix of Richard Linklater and Abbott and Costello, “Prince Avalanche” is an oddment, but one that brings some small, peculiar pleasures.
Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch play an uptight romantic and a loutish ladies’ man working as a two-man road crew in rural Texas in the 1980s. At night they sleep in tents by the road, and most of the movie is the two of them either irritating each other or bonding.
Writer-director David Gordon Green, who based his script on a little-known 2011 Icelandic film — triple quirk points for that — has himself alternated between broad Hollywood comedies like “Pineapple Express” and “Your Highness” and introspective indies like “George Washington.” You can sense the two Greens fighting it out, with neither winning.
Rudd is a skilled straight man but Hirsch, who comes across as a decaf Jack Black, isn’t funny enough to do the honors as a font of mischief. Still, the film finds mild, dry comedy in ideas like attending regional beauty pageants to hit on losing contestants or (sort of) attempting suicide by jumping off a 12-foot cliff. And the grace notes between the comic moments are at times poignant and endearing.