August 19, 2005

I completely forgot that I reviewed THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN when it came out in 2005, but there it is. It’s not the kind of movie I normally review, but I thought it would be important to include in this series as the most influential comedy of the summer and as the opposite of WEDDING CRASHERS. That one was about smarmy well-paid pickup artists really falling in love while trying to just get laid via deception, this is about an awkward dork who works as a stocker at an electronics chain store and doesn’t own a car who has spent his life deliberately not trying to get down women’s pants, and the lie to the woman he’s falling for is just not telling her that he’s okay with not having sex yet because he’s scared he’ll do a bad job.

Steve Carell (last seen in BEWITCHED) plays Andy, friendly but socially awkward action figure collector whose life changes after his co-workers David (Paul Rudd, HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS), Jay (Romany Malco, URBAN MENACE, TICKER) and Cal (Seth Rogen, DONNIE DARKO) very reluctantly decide to invite him to fill a vacancy in their after-hours poker game in the store. He does such a bad job of joining in their locker room talk that they figure out he’s a virgin and make it their quest in life to help him change that. “From now on your dick is my dick. I’m getting you some pussy,” vows Jay.

But I think it’s kinda sweet that they seem to genuinely want to make his life better, and this includes not only bringing him to bars and giving him bad pickup advice but even David taking him for coffee on a break and being informed it’s the first time they’ve talked for more than 30 seconds. David sort of takes on the best friend role and the joke of his character is that he’s unhealthily fixated on a past relationship, while Jay’s problem is not being loyal to his current girlfriend Jill (Erica Vittina Phillips, HOW HIGH, FRIDAY AFTER NEXT). Jay is the most out-of-line womanizer among them, giving him many of the laughs, but he also goes through some life changes. Cal actually doesn’t get as much of a backstory, but he’s their younger, cooler co-worker who wears Nirvana Nevermind, Sonic Youth Dirty, GZA Liquid Swords and Public Enemy Fear of a Black Planet t-shirts. He enjoys honoring the important albums of the first half of the ‘90s.

Meanwhile Andy is actually developing a genuine relationship with Trish (Catherine Keener, SURVIVAL QUEST, OUT OF SIGHT, DEATH TO SMOOCHY), who he just met as a customer and she gave her number to him. The one that actually works started from normal human interaction and just being himself, while all the attempts to put on an act get him puked on and stuff.

It’s an interesting time capsule of a 20 year old view of nerd culture. Andy’s apartment-filling (but not cluttered) collection of vintage action figures is treated as his defining lady-repellant, though I feel confident that wearing bad polo shirts tucked in and combing his hair that way would be a bigger factor. But I think it has sort of a neutral stance, acknowledging that his hobby and playing video games makes him not a stud without making him a caricature like in earlier nerd depictions.

His collection brings him together with Trish because her job is selling things for people on eBay (and she must be really good for the amount of money they claim he earns just by selling toys) but the only time we ever broach the topic of how he feels about selling them is during an angry outburst, the sincerity of which is up to interpretation. Maybe he’s giving up something that’s important to him just to impress a woman, maybe they’ve become a burden and he’s decided he’ll be happier without them, we don’t know. Not really the point I guess.

I didn’t necessarily think there would be a bunch of “that didn’t age well” jokes in here, but there’s quite a bit you wouldn’t see today. There’s a use of the r-word, no surprise there. The bigger one is an ongoing joke of the characters riffing on “you know how I know you’re gay?” (followed by reasons like“‘Cause you macramed yourself a pair of jean shorts”). It’s in the context of the most macho of the characters already having said “Dude, it’s not a big deal, you like to fuck guys” when he thought Andy’s lack of knowledge about women meant he was gay, so it doesn’t come across as sincere bigotry, but you can’t really get around that to tease each other about it means it’s an insult to be gay.

There’s also a scene where Jay hires a prostitute (Jazzmun, HELLBENT) for Andy and is surprised to later hear her described as a “transvestite” and “tranny.” We can see it now as another trans panic joke, though to the movie’s credit Andy says “She was really nice, incidentally,” getting her pronouns right and everything.

Oh yeah, one last one. There’s a scene where a character played by Elizabeth Banks (SPIDER-MAN 2) brings Andy to her apartment for kinky sex and is in the bathtub pleasuring herself when he gets scared and tries to leave but he discovers that his trio of friends followed him into the apartment. When they leave Cal goes into the bathroom. Now, to be clear it is 100% explicit that she enjoys this surprise and consents to him joining her, but I think in 2025 a movie wouldn’t fuck around with him making the presumption that he can just enter a masturbating stranger’s bathroom, and I respect that about 2025.

I think the biggest thing that changed though is that this seems like a familiar type of comedy. At the time it was sort of the beginning of a movement. Judd Apatow was well known as a writer (HEAVYWEIGHTS, CELTIC PRIDE) and producer, but this was his directorial debut, kicking off what became a formula of using his group of regular cast members, focusing on protagonists who were supposed to be likable but not traditionally attractive, undergirding wild comical swings with an emotional sincerity, and encouraging improv from his actors which often become riffs with many variations on a joke.

(One crazy fact is that this was shot on film [by Clint Eastwood’s d.p. Jack N. Green!] and Technicolor sent them champagne for surpassing a million feet of film on their last day of shooting.)

Just seeing Carell as the star of a movie was a big deal at the time. Working with him on ANCHORMAN made Apatow want to see a Steve Carell vehicle. Carell suggested the idea based on a sketch he’d done at Second City – I suspect the “bag of sand” discussion was in that. The Office had only started in May so I still thought of him as a correspondent from The Daily Show made good.

I had watched Freaks and Geeks and I remember that it was exciting to see Rogen in such a major role – he was a supporting character on the show who became a favorite, and now this supporting movie role led to starring in Apatow’s followup KNOCKED UP and then officially becoming a screenwriter with SUPERBAD.

We take these things for granted now but this is such a stacked cast, with an early comedic role for Banks (though she’d been in WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER), it was before Jane Lynch was known from Glee, it was Jonah Hill’s second movie (he was in I HEART HUCKABEES), first for Mindy Kaling, third for Kat Dennings, sixth for Kevin Hart.

Come to think of it, even the poster was new and funny back then, that title with Carell doing that expression, it got a big laugh when you first saw it. Now you’ve seen that exact image and so many other things in the same style over two hundred million billion times, so they’ve been drained of all meaning. It’s gone. Nothing that was so fresh about THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN at the time feels new now that it’s, you know, provably very old. So I’m happy to report that this movie still makes me laugh.

It’s a cast full of funny people that all get numerous times to shine, most notably Malco, and I’d also like to single out Banks and Leslie Mann in smaller roles where they are crazy but also pretty sympathetic (despite inexplicable sexual attraction to Andy). Carell probly has the trickiest role and maybe falters the most as he tries to put a character with some cartoonish qualities into a real world where he’s expected to have an adult relationship and emotions. But I think it works, in part because they came up with this idea of indie queen Keener as a romantic lead in a studio comedy, correctly identifying her as a middle aged woman who’s very attractive in an unconventional (by Hollywood standards) way and quirky enough for us to believe she’d like an unconventional guy. I guess that’s the real trick of it – it’s a high-volume laugh movie where I don’t roll my eyes at them wanting me to care about the love story. That’s not easy.