Blessedly semen-free

Rating: 6/10 (19 September 2005)

It would seem self-evident that certain things should be avoided during sex, simulated or otherwise: braces, pastries, super glue, zippers. All these items scream Sex Comedy, though, and have featured prominently in big Hollywood scores (no pun intended) in recent years. These flicks have managed to be more or less consistently pretty funny, although getting audience guffaws at the sheer relief of watching mortifying things happen to other people during sex seems like pinning the tail on the donkey with no blindfold. Regardless, now comes "The 40 Year Old Virgin," gamely continuing the palliative formula of sticking our collective carnal neuroses on some schmucky loser, and reaping the rewards of our horrified laughter.
"Virgin" succeeds largely on the dopey antics of star Steve Carrell, who makes an art form of creating comic centerpieces out of straight men. As Andrew, the titular touch-me-not, Carrell chortles and wheedles his way through innumerable conversations on which he has no expertise with an incompetent evasiveness worthy of Jeff Lebowski. A film that takes its central gag as its title is clearly not into wasting time, and "The 40 Year Old Virgin" rapidly settles into a series of sketches of ill-advised attempts to enter poor Andrew into the world of the violated. There's a disastrous round of speed-dating, a pick up lesson ("just keep asking questions," advises Andrew's buddy), and a transvestite hooker, all of which mostly comes off as standard, i.e. not very funny, fare. Even less amusing is "Virgin"'s insistence on detouring into unnecessary gay jokes, as well as the two caricatured Pakistani coworkers whose only function is to sound funny talking in heavily-accented street patois.
Carrell himself, though, is funny, and "The 40 Year Old Virgin" is at its best when focusing on Andrew himself, rather than his pratfalls or cadre of Wacky Friends. The painfully transparent false confidence with which he equates a breast with a bag of sand, for example, or tells a bar floozy "I hope you have a big trunk, because I'm putting my bike in it" is far more restrained and subtly hilarious than any of the genre's more preferred "semen in a" gags. The film is smart to go light on the scatology (at least in comparison to its predecessors), instead finding much of its humor in the pathologies of involuntary celibacy. Bike-riding, action figure-collecting Andrew has a lot in common with Steve Buscemi's obsessive schlump from "Ghost World," though he does at times appear as much a victim of bad luck as of a defective personality.
"The 40 Year Old Virgin" is nothing new, but does its thing well, and is a perfect stage for Carrell's deadpan histrionics. The ability to elevate basically mundane material is a too rare gift with which Carrell is evidently blessed. Let's hope Hollywood notices.