Prince Avalanche — A Funny Road Repair Comedy

This poster, weirdly, is a fairly accurate summary of the movie.

This is rather weird for me to write, and not just because I don’t write many movie reviews. Prince Avalance (written and directed by David Gordon Green) is just a really weird movie. Beyond the fact that I enjoyed it and think you should see it, trying to get all of my thoughts straight about this film is rather difficult due to it being, well, kind of weird–but I will attempt it anyway.
This movie stars two very funny people: Paul Rudd (who I never recognize, but especially here because he looks more like Ben Affleck) and Emile Hirsch (who looks more like Jack Black). Your mileage may vary on if that’s good or bad, but it’s something I have to talk about because it caused me quite a bit of confusion for most of the movie. In this, they play construction workers, posting signs and repainting lines on the road after a wildfire destroyed large parts of Texas in the 1980s.

They also don’t get along, at all. Alvin (Rudd) is a little too tight-laced, while Lance (Hirsch) is a slacker and only there because his sister, Alvin’s girlfriend, thought he needed to get a job. For 80% of this movie, it’s all about the two of them going out and repairing the roads, and it’s much more interesting than something fitting that description has any right to be. Somehow, they manage to make scenes that consist almost entirely of hammering road signs in or talking while painting the lines funny, which is a natural result of handing a funny script to two funny people.

Okay, but what about the other 20% of the movie? Occasionally, Alvin and Lance try to deal directly with the aftermath of the fire on an emotional level, and those scenes tended to fall flat. It’s not that they never got emotion right – there are some really good emotional scenes between the two of them – but it’s whenever they deal with the fact that they’re cleaning up after a wildfire that killed people and destroyed lives that the movie loses it. I have to give them a lot of credit for filming it in Texas after an actual wildfire, which gives the movie an authenticity that I never questioned while watching it, but somehow those scenes just fell flat anyway, even while filming in the wreckage of what used to be an actual house. There’s no consistency or cohesion between this part of the story and the scenes of Alvin and Lance just being themselves, but luckily the less successful of the two takes up much less of the running time.

I’m not crazy, right? They look like Jack Black and Ben Affleck.

I know that sounds like I’m condemning the movie, but don’t hear me wrong. This really is just a small portion of what’s in this film. As you might guess from my description of their characters, Alvin and Lance are two guys who shouldn’t ever get along (and they don’t, mostly), but they’re forced to. This probably sounds very familiar, but there’s something to be said for very strong execution. There’s no moment of revelation that completely changes them, just a gradual understanding of each other that moves them just a slight bit closer at the end from where they were in the beginning. They also never sacrifice the humor for character development or vice versa – one of the best scenes in the movie just involves the two of them sitting in a truck listening to a German educational tape. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s a hilarious scene that also shows a lot of character development, and this, along with many funny and meaningful scenes, hold this together and allow you to ignore the missteps along the way.

That is the movie in a nutshell. Two funny people being funny and genuine people, with some slightly out of place serious moments that fade into the background over time. It’s definitely a movie I recommend seeing, which you can on several On Demand services, so there’s no reason you can’t watch it.

Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) had to tone down the weirdness of this movie to make the review coherent. If you find what he says interesting, follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings for more, shorter thoughts.