Cheap Laughs

THE BAXTER

Directed by Michael Showalter

THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN

Directed by Judd Apatow

Of all movie genres, the comedy has proved most resistant to innovation. Contemporary dramas don't look, feel or move like their equivalents from 50 or even 20 years ago. But with rare, visionary exceptions-Jacques Tati, the Coen brothers and Wes Anderson come to mind-comedies are much the same. Take away color, slow motion and the music montage and you won't see a whole lot of difference between My Little Chickadee and Fever Pitch, or A Day at the Races and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.

I don't intend to suggest that any of those movies are unfunny-Kumar's dream about courting and marrying a gigantic bag of weed is one of the funniest things I've ever seen-but rather that the solid formula can be a crutch.

Consider, for example, Judd Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Watching it last week at the Cobble Hill Cinemas, I felt like an atheist who'd wandered into a tent revival. The crowd laughed ecstatically at the movie's five or six big setpieces (the drunk-driving scene and the chest waxing really are as funny as you've heard). But they also laughed at the lame exposition, the sketch-comedy soundtrack gags (the "Greatest American Hero" theme) and some scenes that were clearly supposed to be gutbusters but felt mistimed (the speed-dating scene seems to last a month). I suspect its success is a testament to star Steve Carell's eerie, Peter Sellers?like intensity as electronics-store clerk Andy Stizer; take that away, and you're looking at a pretty good Saturday Night Live movie.

Don't get me wrong: Virgin is hilarious in places. But it should have been brilliant. Director Apatow, who cowrote the script with Carell, is a comedy hero who has repeatedly disproved Ron Rosenbaum's formulation that warm is the opposite of funny. (So have the Farrelly brothers.) From his early work on HBO's pitilessly hilarious The Larry Sanders Show and the botched but intriguing The Cable Guy through Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, he's managed the seemingly impossible feat of making us feel for screwed-up, marginalized characters without soft-pedaling their irritating traits or ignoring society's complicity in their unhappiness.

Apatow's singular talent still pops up here and there, but the warm/funny aspects aren't gracefully integrated. The "warm" stuff-centered on the hero's relationship with Trish (Catherine Keener), a 40-year-old mother and grandmother-feels blandly obligatory, like a romance in an Adam Sandler movie. And even at its most charming, the love story lacks the volatile energy that animates Andy's physical misadventures and his squirmy conversations with his sexual-predator boss (Jane Lynch) and trash-talking colleagues (Romany Malco, Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd, who plays a jilted sad-sack in both this movie and The Baxter).

The script also fails to seize on a fascinating subtext: the suggestion that Andy's lifelong celibacy and Boy Scout code aren't evidence of stunted growth, but an involuntarily defense against a world that's drowning in selfishness and mainstreamed coarseness. ("Forty is the new 20," says Rudd's character, David, who bequeaths Andy a treasure trove of hardcore porn.)

Andy's not scared of sex itself, much less revolted by it. Instead, he's appalled and intimidated by the presumption that every American should have a porn star's expertise and lack of inhibition. He's a gentleman who objects when men casually refer to women as "bitches" and tries to halt a sexually graphic workplace conversation by asking, "Will you please stop?" Andy's purity (however emotionally arrested) is more startling-and more challenging to mainstream "values"-than any of the carnage in Sin City or Kill Bill. If it had been relentlessly and unapologetically explored, Virgin might have been the year's most radical Hollywood comedy: an R-rated movie about the numbing effect of coarseness.

Apatow and Carell can't or won't go that far. They sentimentalize Andy's arrested development, linking his virginity and his refusal to remove his mint-condition action figures from their packages-a funny gag, but inadequate and misleading, because it fails to capitalize on the script's suggestion that Andy's monk-nerd lifestyle represents not a retreat, but a rebuke.

Virgin isn't tough enough on Andy's tormentors; it lets them-and, by extension, ticket buyers who share their casual coarseness-off the hook. The film promises to slash audience complacency with a straight razor, but Apatow settles for prodding genre cliches with a spork. If you're going to title a movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin, you shouldn't be afraid to draw blood.

Virgin let me down, but it's a livelier schmuck-makes-good comedy than The Baxter. This debut feature by writer-director-actor Michael Showalter has a fresh premise: It's a sympathetic portrait of a character type that gets dumped and forgotten in most movies. Between the warm, crisp photography (by Tim Orr, who shot George Washington and Undertow) and the movie's clever sense of color coordination (the leading lady's beret matches her eyes), it's a pleasure to look at. (Virgin looks like it got left in the back pocket of someone's jeans on laundry day.)

But as theatergoers always say, you can't hum the scenery. As in Virgin, the script is less a cohesive narrative than a bunch of sketches that make and remake the same point: Showalter's Elliot is too inhibited and considerate to keep his fiancee, Caroline (Elizabeth Banks), a Meg Ryan?ish goofball babe with a barely suppressed wild streak, from running off with Elliot's rival, the scruffy, impulsive Bradley (Justin Theroux).

What should have been a smart riposte to Nora Ephron/Garry Marshall cliches settles for revisiting them from a new angle. The characters are aware of themselves as types, but with few exceptions (notably an impassioned monologue by Elliot defending kindness and stability), The Baxter never treats them as more than types, and fails to hold them reponsible for their clueless selfishness. And its idealization of Elliot and his soulmate, the office temp and cabaret singer Cecil (Michelle Williams), strikes me as an equally noxious alternative to the myopic Romeos and runaway-bride Juliets whose antics are lionized in most romances.

Compounding its blandness, the movie moseys along like a screwball comedy played at half-speed. Long after you've gotten a joke-like the bit where Elliot gets caught lying to Caroline and Bradley about being a regular at a hip burger joint, the movie's best, most agonizing scene-Showalter continues to belabor it. The movie's mediocrity is depressing considering Showalter's gifts as both an actor (he has the young De Niro's wan, stubbly spaciness and Charles Grodin's parched sarcasm) and a writer. His work on MTV's The State, the 80s-comedy spoof Wet Hot American Summer and Comedy Central's Stella are more adventurous.

The latter deserves a look: It's a deadpan-weird, Marx Brothers?style goof in which Showalter and costars Michael Ian Black and David Wain play roommates. In the premiere, the trio got kicked out of their apartment and had to spend the night on the street like old movie hobos. They sliced a kidney bean three ways and served it with toothpicks, a surreal but equitable solution that The Baxter is too mild to match, but that Groucho, Harpo and Chico would have appreciated.