Boys Gone Wild
By Josh Larsen

A Trojan horse of a sex comedy, The 40-Year-Old Virgin wouldn’t be wholly out of place as part of an abstinence campaign. Teens hoping for sex scenes and naughty talk might be shocked by the message of restraint that is smuggled in along with the crude gags.

 

Granted, the sex scenes and naughty talk are there. This film earns its R rating, and its makers likely would recoil from being called responsible. But it is the movie’s very commitment to capturing the raunchy camaraderie of immature manhood—the graphic patter, the leering pranks—that makes its eventual plea for something more mature feel authentic as well. If most abstinence videos shown to teenagers merely end up preaching to the choir, this might be a roundabout way of getting the choir some new members.

 

Steve Carell, the tightly wound and completely clueless boss on television’s “The Office,” expands on his dimwit persona as Andy Stitzer, the sexually inexperienced hero of this movie’s title. As Andy explains to one of his co-workers early on, except for a few mishaps in his youth, sex never really happened for him, and he eventually just stopped trying, choosing instead a solitary life among the action figures and movie memorabilia in his low-budget apartment.

 

His co-workers, however, decide that deflowering Andy must become their number-one priority, thereby setting up the series of misadventures that comprise the bulk of the film. And so he has a depressing run-in with a drunken woman (Leslie Mann) at a nightclub. He has a frightening conversation with a female bookstore clerk who considers sexual harassment a form of pillow talk. Sex is more alarming than Andy ever dreamed.

 

What’s curious about each of these encounters engineered by Andy’s supposedly playboy friends, is the way they reveal the shallowness of the playboy lifestyle. Nearly everyone Andy meets gets plenty of action—or at least pretends to—but none of them is any happier for it. It is Andy, alone with his action figures, who seems content.

 

Not that the movie makers want him to remain a virgin. Eventually Andy stumbles into a tentative relationship with Trish (Catherine Keener), a single mother—a grandmother, even—whose uninhibited youth led her to become much more cautious as an adult. She’s the perfect match for Andy, whose inexperience with sex has led to a nearly paralyzing fear of it. So they back themselves into a supremely old-fashioned notion: building a relationship before jumping into bed.

 

The 40-Year-Old Virgin doesn’t present this as simple. Much of the humor comes from the ways Trish, and eventually Andy, suppress their amorous urges. Keener, especially, brings a welcome earthiness to the otherwise farcical proceedings; her Trish is a passionate mess who has learned, from experience, that a strong relationship must involve something more than physical passion.

 

Not all of the humor relies on sex. Carell, who wrote the film with director Judd Apatow, seizes the opportunity here for a strong lead role. When Andy’s friends force him to have his chest hair painfully removed as part of a makeover, Carell turns the scene into a riotous succession of profane non sequiturs.

 

The scenes at the soulless electronics superstore where Andy and his friends work, meanwhile, provide some high white-collar satire. Paul Rudd is especially funny as a wayward buddy of Andy’s who leads a revolt over the manager’s decision to play Michael McDonald videos on a continuous loop in the showroom. There is a reason these guys endlessly chase women; their lives seem to offer little else.

 

The film suggests slyly how that could change—by having the men at its center change their attitudes toward women. There could hardly be a squarer idea these days than putting an emotional relationship before a physical one, so finding that sentiment in a major Hollywood comedy is something of a minor miracle.

 

The irony of The 40-Year-Old-Virgin, of course, is that it’s likely to end up on a shelf next to copies of Girls Gone Wild. But maybe that’s exactly where its message of restraint and respect is needed.