DVD Review: The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Just FYI, this is a review of the unrated DVD version of the film.

Some dumb comedies are better than others.

I have a rule for a dumb comedy: If it makes me laugh out loud twice, I'll recommend it. Barely. I'm hard to please when it comes to comedy, and it's rare that the comedies that come out these days actually make me laugh. Most of them are really just stupid. There've been a lot of bad movies released over the past few years, and if there's one genre that's passed off the glut of the worst ones, it's comedy (Example One ... Example Two ... Example Three ... Example Four ... Example Five). These aren't movies. These are marketing devices designed to give stupid people the impression that they've seen a movie.

So I have high standards, and if a comedy can get me to forget those standards and actually laugh a couple of times, I'll recommend it. Based on that system, I have to recommend The 40-Year-Old Virgin... and I have to recommend it fairly highly, because to be honest, I laughed a lot while I was watching it. I pretty much laughed for most of the movie.

Now, don't go into this expecting a comedy that breaks any new ground. There's pretty much more of the same stuff we've seen over and over again. A lot of gentile jokes and gay jokes and sex jokes and bathroom humor. The thing that this movie has going for it is that it gets you to genuinely like the main character. At least, it got me to genuinely like the main character. Once the movie won me over in that way, my guard was down... and I found myself smiling. And chuckling. And laughing really hard. Laughing so hard a couple of times that I had to hit the pause button.

Here's the story: Steve Carell (The Daily Show, The Office) plays Andy, a 40 year old geek who's never lost his virginity. His buddies at work find out about it and set out to make sure that Andy loses his virginity as soon as possible. The thing is, Andy is basically happy with his life. Sex isn't a preoccupation for him. He's lonely, but he doesn't seem to really realize it until his buddies start hounding him about getting dates and scoring. It's about this time that Andy meets Trish (Catherine Keener), the first woman he's been genuinely interested in for a long time. The more he gets to know her, the more Andy realizes that Trish could be the beginning of the best years of his life. Will Andy manage to overcome his insecurities enough to make an impression on Trish? Will the newfound pressures of his sex-obsessed buddies ruin Andy's chances with a genuinely nice woman? Will the combination of Andy's sexual insecurity and the perversions of his friends turn him into some kind of sexually dysfunctional zombie?

Well, yes and no. Andy's problems arise where it's convenient for the plot (and most easily turned into a joke) for them to do so. And, Andy manages to stay innocent in all the right areas, too... which is crucial to helping the viewer continue to like him. Overall, and in spite of a few completely gratuitous topless scenes, the movie manages to walk the line between gross-out comedy and chick-flick very well.

What really won me over to the movie, like I said before, was the innocence and heart of the Andy character. At the risk of giving away some spoilers, I'll site some examples: I was really tickled by the scene that ended with Andy happily watching an Everybody Loves Raymond rerun. I got a huge kick out of the scene wherein Andy admitted how he really felt about the girl who worked in the bookstore... and the movie's last scene, involving Andy's first sexual encounter (oh, you had know it would end that way) actually endorsed an old-fashioned and conservative attitude about sex. Wow! An old-fashioned attitude about sex in a modern dumb comedy? Who saw that coming? Not me.

And, admittedly, some of the cruder jokes really got me laughing, too. There's a mildly gay-bashing exchange between two of Andy's friends ("You know how I know you're gay?") that was flat-out hilarious. Then, there's the prerequisite little-black-book scene. And a scene involving the supposed sexual prowess of Andy's boss (the always funny Jane Lynch) had me in stitches.

So I recommend The 40-Year-Old Virgin pretty enthusiastically. The version we rented was the unrated version, and I'm willing to bet that the only difference was that the R-Rated version didn't have as much of the gratuitous nudity. Stick with the R-Rated version if that kind of unnecessary content bothers you... and don't rent the movie at all if you're offended by very crude language and humor.

If you're looking to laugh your butt off, though... and if you enjoy comedies that actually make you care about the characters, there isn't much better out there than The 40-Year-Old Virgin.





  ¶ 4:41 AM