Shared Darkness

Given that it’s currently all things Steve Carell, what with the release of Evan Almighty, I really should have re-posted this review of The 40-Year-Old Virgin much earlier. Oh well, here goes, redacted from its original publication on occasion of the film’s release in August of 2005, by an outlet that still owes me (and many others) money, an outlet that may or may not be named Now Playing Magazine, formerly published by Douglas Brisotti. To wit:



Given the rich tradition of comedies of humiliation, it’s hard to believe that until The 40-Year-Old Virgin there hasn’t been a major Hollywood laugher set around the romantic fumblings and flailing of an adult virgin. (I guess this says something about where the line of degradation exists for actors, or perhaps more accurately men in general.) Given Hollywood‘s penchant for smooth edges, then, it’s also surprising that the collaboration between writer-actor Steve Carell and writer-director Judd Apatow still retains such a shaggy, idiosyncratic appeal. Coming closely on the heels of Wedding Crashers‘ R-rated success, The 40-Year-Old Virgin seems to augur a potential return to more delightfully unrestrained but not insistently vulgar adult comedy.

Carell stars as Andy Stitzer, an all-around nice guy who works at an electronics store in the San Fernando Valley, content with his bicycle for transportation and his vast assortment of videogames and mint-in-box collectibles for entertainment. Andy’s lack of success with women has calcified into a complete lack of amorous effort. When Andy gets sucked into a poker game with three co-workers — David (Paul Rudd), Jay (Romany Malco) and Cal (Seth Rogen) — and subsequently “outed,” however, his life takes a big turn. His newfound friends are adamant that they play a part in his “de-virginization,” and so they bombard Andy with advice and push him into interactions with the opposite sex, a string of women who include a drunken, bipolar speed-dater (Leslie Mann, Apatow’s real-life wife) and a nearby bookshop employee, Beth (Elizabeth Banks), enamored with Andy’s spookily casual indifference. (He’s instructed by Cal, hilariously, to “act like David Caruso from Jade.”)

Andy’s dilemma isn’t merely some misogynistic quest, though, as he meets Trish (Catherine Keener), a divorcée and single mother (and grandmother, though there’s thankfully no baby involved), and finds himself falling for her even as Jay and Cal insist that he needs some “starter nookie.” As he wins Trish over, Andy must slowly come to grips with how to break his secret to her.

Not particularly surprisingly, the film feels very episodic and bears the marks of test audience-tinkering. Certain scenes, such as one involving a transvestite prostitute (accidentally) hired by one of Andy’s friends, are over before they even begin, and other sequences — including a bit where Andy gets locked in the showroom with nothing but porn playing around him on all the big-screen TVs, and a scene of self-gratification set to Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello” — seem definitely trimmed with an eye toward propriety. That may seem strange for a comedy to all outward appearances bawdy as all get-out, but The 40-Year-Old Virgin is essentially a relationship comedy masquerading as a sex farce.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing (think of the diminishing return of Stifler and the grandmother in the dreadful, forced American Wedding). The 40-Year-Old Virgin creates palpably human characters (Rudd, Rogen and Malco are all a treat) and grows the comedy from there. If the film cycles through jokes and scenarios at a clip that’s both inspiring and sometimes frustrating (because it doesn’t fully exploit certain set-ups to their logical conclusion), you at least appreciate its groundedness. Apatow (Freaks and Geeks) proves himself as suited for the big screen as the small, and Carell, taking a cue from Ben Stiller’s propensity for comedic debasement, launches himself into his role with a complete lack of ego; the much-trailered chest wax scene is 100 percent authentic, and achieves a sort of flippant Zen brilliance even though you know what’s coming. (Universal, R, 116 minutes)