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PLOT: It's about a 40-year-old virgin. Duh!
Just when some of us were ready to surrender broad Hollywood comedies to the pubescent demographic, along comes The 40 Year-Old Virgin to serve notice that "broad" isn't necessarily synonymous with "stupid."
This isn't to say that the movie about... well, a 40-year-old virgin, doesn't aim low occasionally for laughs. There's a puke scene, but it's exactly the sort you might actually experience on the worst date of one's life. And if you've seen the trailers, you know our vestal hero undergoes a chest "waxing" in an effort to increase his currency as a sex candidate.
The 40 Year-Old Virgin is also undeniably a product of Hollywood, with three formulaic acts and a happy ending. And yet it isn't what this movie might share with the oeuvre of Rob Schneider that's important, but what it doesn't.
For starters, it's smart, taking a cliched comedy notion -- that the number of Star Wars action figures you own is inversely proportional to the amount of sex you've had -- and creating a living, breathing, likable person from the geek template.
Credit Steve Carell, late of The Daily Show, who has variously played scene-stealing doofuses (Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy) and jerks (Bruce Almighty). As Adam Stitzer -- a 40-year-old man with a half-million dollars worth of action figures in his apartment, an easy chair with built-in game controls and a weekly date to watch Survivor at his elderly neighbours' place -- he's managed to create a character who is, amazingly, not a one-note object of ridicule.
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Adam is quite bright; quick, in fact. At a poker game in the backroom of the stereo store at which he works, he fakes his way hilariously through a male-bonding ritual of relating sex adventures, a facade that only falls apart when he describes the "feel" of a woman's breast as "like a bag of sand."
That slip-up is the catalyst that sends Adam's well-meaning workmates on a campaign to get him laid. As a group, they are not exactly poster-boys for smooth heterosexual sex lives. David (Paul Rudd) is in denial over a breakup that's already two years old, Jay (Romany Malco) is a married philanderer, and Cal (Seth Rogan) is a pot-smoking drunk whose weekend sexcapades are barely remembered through an inebriated haze.
Their dubious advice sees Adam through a series of misfiring adventures with drunken bar-pickups and a sex-crazed bookstore clerk. But it's Trish (the always-great Catherine Keener) a single mom at a neighbouring strip-mall store who is introduced early in the film with a blazing "girl of his dreams" neon sign.
Their inevitable pairing has its bumps in the road -- including a hilarious and sweet scene in which Adam accompanies Trish's teenaged daughter to a family-planning counselling session that he gets more out of than she does.
And it's the sweetness of Carell's character that makes me pause to wonder what it is that makes The 40 Year-Old Virgin different. Hollywood comedies have come to be dominated by Saturday Night Live alumni, a genre that has dumbed down over the years into one more-or-less mean-spirited note.
Carell, who's not from that gang, has a persona that's different and welcome. Pretty good for a first time.
(This film is rated 14-A)