Andy Stitzer (Steve Carell) needs to get lucky. A stock room employee at a Los Angeles electronics chain store and collector of action figures (in their original packaging), Andy is 40 years old and has never enjoyed the pleasures of intimate relations with a woman. During a late night poker game with his braggart co-workers, Andy confesses his inexperience and his friends decide to teach him the rules of seduction. After a series of failed attempts at scoring, Andy falls in love with Trish (Catherine Keener), the owner of a store that sells items on eBay, and the pair decides to hold off sex while their relationship develops. Will the couple come together and end Andy’s reign as the oldest man in Los Angeles never to have “done the deed”? Will fate keep them apart and cement Andy’s destiny as the world’s loneliest loser? Who cares? By now, many of you reading this article have plopped down your $10.00 and have found out the predictable answer to Andy’s dilemma by watching the “Number One Movie in America!!”, Judd Apatow’s mediocre The 40 Year Old Virgin. Strangely, Apatow and Carell’s story of the virgin with a heart of gold has garnered favorable reviews from critics who admire the film’s dirty-mouthed approach to the clichéd love story at the film’s heart. Despite the film’s good-natured approach to Andy’s dilemma, showcasing the very funny Carell as the film’s most stable character (despite his numerous ‘nerdy’ shortcomings), the movie is just the sort of middle of the road character comedy that passes for box-office gold these days. With films like Anchorman, The Wedding Crashers and Old School, films that have lined the pockets of studio executives across Los Angeles, Apatow and his cadre of like-minded Hollywood golden boys have created a new American comedy trope; Assholes in Love. If you listen closely, late at night, you can hear the sound of Ernst Lubitch, Billy Wilder and Preston Sturgis turning over in their graves.

The heyday of the well plotted, wit-soaked American comedy is well behind us, but as Hollywood continues to pander to the lowest common denominator in the audience, the opportunity to praise American comedy has come so infrequently, a mediocre gag-fest like The 40 Year Old Virgin receives critical praise for having the decency to respect its naïve protagonist. But this is nothing more than sleight of hand. The formula is a simple one; While audiences root for characters like Andy Stitzer and Old School’s Mitch Martin (Luke Wilson) to overcome their rejection at the hands women of all shapes and sizes, the new American comedy surrounds its heroes with asshole friends who provide the nasty id to the protagonist’s ego. This new comic Iago has found its apotheosis in the personage of Vince Vaughn, a very funny, affable actor who has made a career out of playing the wisecracking hustler who just wants to have a good time in spite of his friend’s reasonable apprehensions. In film after film, Vaughn reprises his breakthrough role in Doug Lyman’s Swingers; the asshole buddy who, in an eternal quest for fun, invariably leads our hero into trouble. In The 40 Year Old Virgin, the Vince Vaughn role is played by not one actor, but three; Paul Rudd (David), Romany Malco (Jay), and Seth Rogen (Cal), a triple-headed hydra of bad advice, thrill-seeking, and offensive behavior. This allows the audience to identify with Andy’s quest for sex and love while laughing at the bland, unfunny and obvious jokes left for the “buddies”. How unfunny and obvious? At the screening I attended, when Andy’s Pakistani co-workers drop the throw away line “Why, do you think we’re Al Qaeda?”, it drew a huge laugh. In that moment, when a terribly badly written joke is dropped for no reason other than its simple recognition among the masses and its appeal to the racial profiling simplifications of the Fox News crowd, the whole premise of the film’s comic goals are laid bare. Yes America, you may think you’re a nice guy like Andy Stitzler, but at heart, you’re the asshole friend.

While identification with a naïve protagonist is a smokescreen for mediocre comedy in The 40 Year Old Virgin, in Werner Herzog’s documentary masterpiece Grizzly Man (currently playing in Ann Arbor), the same identification brings revelation. In 1990, Timothy Treadwell, an out of work actor and recovering addict, left California in order to spend his summer living in the Alaskan wilderness among the grizzly bears. For thirteen summers, Treadwell lived in the same community of bears, learning about their habits and seeking to protect them from poachers. In October of 2003, while staying in the “grizzly maze” a few weeks beyond his usual departure date, a rogue grizzly devoured Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard. Treadwell, having documented his summer forays into Alaska on videotape since 1998, had his camera rolling during the attack (with the lens cap on) and unwittingly recorded his own gristly death. Herzog was invited to review Treadwell’s footage and, enhancing it with his own interviews and footage, went on to create the film primarily from Treadwell’s images.

Timothy Treadwell explores the un'bear'able lightness of being? No? Grinning and 'bear'ing it? Treadwell 'bears' his soul to the camera? Hmmm. Insert your own pun here...

If Grizzly Man were simply a documentary built with found footage about a naïve environmental advocate who died in the wild because he over estimated his personal connection to nature, the film would still be an extremely moving experience because of Treadwell’s passion for the bears, foxes, and the stunning landscape of the Alaskan wilderness. This is, however, a Werner Herzog film. Instead of relying on the traditional documentary form, there are dueling viewpoints at play in the film, and Herzog creates a powerful tension by pitting Treadwell’s innocent yet misunderstanding love of the natural world against the director’s own recognition of the violent indifference of nature toward human empathy with it.

As with his series of recent documentary features, Herzog seems to be exploring ideas about the world that are at loggerheads with his own icy rationalism. What Grizzly Man (and Wheel of Time and The White Diamond before it) shows us about the world is not an objective representation of its subject’s experience, but a battle taking place within Herzog himself as he seeks to reconcile his own fearful desire to embrace and harness natural beauty with his logical understanding of the folly in attempting to do so. In this way, Herzog’s latest triptych of documentaries is a logical extension of his work as a fiction filmmaker. In films like Aguirre: Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, Herzog exposed the ludicrous expectations of the colonial project and its misapplication of rational ideals. Sure, human intention and big ideas are the stuff of mankind’s greatest accomplishments, but nine times out of ten, they are instead the source of incredible human disaster. While many optimistic audience members may find the worldview on display in Grizzly Man to be cynical, there is no doubting Herzog’s deep devotion to humanism and idealism. There is nothing but admiration from the filmmaker as, in film after film, he shows the odds stacked against us, and the inevitability of our failure. Herzog seems eternally captivated by the beauty of man’s folly as well as his own understanding that, like everything else in nature, human nature is inescapable and leads to nothing but trouble. It is the purpose of art to expose us to ourselves, and Grizzly Man captures the dangerous naiveté in the American myth, a part of our character so often misunderstood and celebrated as pluck and moxie, with an intellectual rigor and an artistry that is sorely needed on the movie screen right now.