The 40 Year Old Virgin

A while back, one web site announced that Peter Jackson had decided to release a director’s cut of King Kong that ran around ninety minutes. It was an April Fool’s joke, but sadly the joke is on the viewer. You have to wait an hour or so before you even get on the island, and then even longer to see Kong watch Naomi writhe.

It’s not as big a crime, but it’s the same thing with The 40 Year Old Virgin – it seems like it ran (if barely) under two hours in the cinema, and now on DVD it cranks out well over two hours of jokes.

It’s too long. Way too long for a comedy. About the only plot line is that the guy in question - Steve Carrell - is an aged virgin,  and by show’s end he’s going to get his rocks off. The rest is cream on the cake, comedic cream that is, and it just didn’t need to turn into a marathon.

That said, if you have a little misogynistic, misanthropic streak inside you, there’s plenty of laughs to be had. Carrell plays the virginal aging nerd as if born to the style, wearing hideous clothes, playing games with himself at home (computer games, you sex obsessed dork, not the other kind), and organising a huge collection of collectable sci fi dolls. For him, sex is a kind of ultimate mystery, so he’s preferred to turn himself into a kind of perpetual child.

At work in a home electronics store, he’s surrounded by an equally typical set of stereotypes (Paul Rudd, Romany Malco and Seth Rogen) who all think Carrell is gay (or weird). When they discover, over a game of poker, that he’s never been laid, they take it as their bounden duty to get him into the sack with a woman (when Carrell compares women’s breasts to a sack of sand it’s typical of the kind of cruel, clever observational comedy at work in the show).

Carrell’s plight leads to a number of acutely observed – from a male perspective – scenarios where various fractured women drive like lunatics, throw up in his face, bring themselves off in the bath with water while he watches, or otherwise act strangely as Carrell goes through the despair of speed and slow dating.

Poor Carrell tries to change himself around, and even goes through a painful attempt to lose his bear status by having his chest hair waxed (fellow bears will shriek and grimace throughout this scene). Of course the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t have to try so hard, and finally Carrell makes his own move when a woman running an E-Bay shopfront across the way introduces herself and shows an interest in Carrell (Catherine Keener doing her best to make her status as grandmother sexy).

Keener has a goth like daughter, and a couple of other kids, so is hardly a beguiling prospect up against some of her competitors, but her world contributes to the comedy, as when Carrell takes the daughter to a sex education class.

In fact, as a series of finely written and played comedy scenes, this 40 year old virgin has plenty of moments, whether social, cultural, sexual, verbal or slapstick comedy. Carrell and his co-writer/director Judd Apatow know how to work a scene so it delivers laughs at the beginning, middle and end.

They also manage to work a reasonably precarious tightrope in terms of humour, pitching black worker up against Indian, or blonde store boss bitch with a lust for Carrell up against his promotion from back room lifter to store manager, or tattoed pot smoking novelist co-worker with a taste for weird women forming a firm friendship despite Carrell’s introverted indifference. There’s plenty of gay insults and sexual banter bouncing around at work and at home, but it’s generally harmless and attributable to the frustrations of the characters, and most of the way it’s also funny.

A fair proportion of the jokes depend on the battle of the sexes, but it’s possible to sit down and watch the show with a woman, and for both sides to feel they’ve been given some fair due. Carrell after all is impeccably nerdish, and while a majority of the women are inclined to be odd, Keener upholds the old fashioned romantic ideas of true love, marriage, and even a bicycle built for two. (Nonetheless, she does persuade him to sell his doll collection for a vast profit! Why do women always make over men? Sorry, this is a film review, observations like this will not happen again, no sir Ms Dworkin).

Even if the plot is a tad light in places, there’s plenty of comedy happening on an incidental level, and the staging is generally okay, though a few might flinch at the extended suspended moment when Carrell and Keener realise they’re made for each other, and Carrell falls off his bike, and the traffic comes to a halt and no one gets out of their car (this might play in LA, where you need a gun when you get out of your car, but not in the rest of the world).

The main crime in the DVD edition is a refusal to kill babies in a quest for super size value, with some skits running too long, and some not entitled to be in the film when weighed against narrative drive or the quality of other, better jokes. But against that, the film manages to make much of the comedy work in an amiable, likeable, character driven way.

This is not the kind of show you need to watch if you don’t like naughty language or the occasional bodily function or erections seen through boxers or a few similar mildly ribald sexual jokes. (Pitiful poor you if that’s the case). It’s also the kind of show that might turn people off if they’ve heard the premise (and given the title, it’s pretty hard to avoid hearing about the premise), because it sounds a little lame, and a little unfunny.

Wrong. If you’re looking for a popcorn movie in house, you could do a lot worse, especially if you put it on at a reasonable time, so that you can stay awake and stick around to the end and enjoy the Hair references (yes folks, seems like that bear Carrell just loves Hair).

Better still, it might even work as a date flick. After all that the women do to poor nerdy Carrell in the show, your viewing companion might just take pity and come across after the screening. Surely a rental is worth the risk, and if it doesn’t work out, you can always take your erection to bed knowing you’ve had a few laughs along the way.

 

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