David (Paul Rudd), torn between sensitive-guy nostalgia for a fallen relationship and barely suppressed rage at the same ex-flame Jay (Romany Malco), a handsome philanderer who screws himself over with his hip-hop attitude and the homophobic would-be ladies’ man Cal (Seth Rogen) - this urgently funny trio constitutes a new-style frat-house burlesque of male paranoia and desire. Uncovering Andy’s secret, his comrades gather forces, like a straight version of the Queer Eye team, to plug him - literally and figuratively - into the world of women. One look at those innocent, trusting orbs and you glimpse the layer cake of Andy’s personality - the terror that has kept him from women, the yearning for order and logic on top of that, and then something more touching, an eagerness for life to stay simple and childlike, for love to be disentangled from fear. Looking like a dour Luke Wilson crossed with Griffin Dunne, Carell is handsome in a polytech math-major sort of way, with a hint of virility in his wrestler’s torso, yet his eyes are deep angelic pools of hope and sadness. An aging naïf who sublimates his libido by spending the afternoon making a mountain of egg salad, Andy may be a light caricature of a clueless, repressed loser (the word ho does not fall trippingly off his tongue), but Carell plays him in the funniest and most surprising way possible: as a credible human being. Here, though, he resists the temptation to turn Andy into some hideous eunuch-creep.
#40 year old virgin movie
In his previous movie roles, as the addled newscaster in Bruce Almighty, the brain-dead meteorologist in Anchorman, even channeling Paul Lynde’s snarky chiffon quiver in Bewitched, Steve Carell revealed a punchy genius for outsize personality tics. It’s the bulge he’s been carrying his whole life, the one he’s too scared to relieve. He has also never had sex, and so it’s hardly a wonder that he wakes up each morning with a giant bulge in his boxers. He’s so obsessive he owns a doll of the Six Million Dollar Man‘s boss. That look is the definition of arrested, and so is Andy’s home, which is a plastic paradise of monster models, videogames, comic books, and action figures carefully sealed in their original packaging. Andy, who works in the stockroom of an electronics megastore, owns a bike instead of a car, and he wears cheesy polo shirts, wide belts, and excessively tidy hair that add up to what must have been a teenage geek’s idea of with-it in 1982.
The title dweeb, Andy Stitzer (Steve Carell), is a tenderly polite and gawky man-child who possesses the look, and demeanor, of a mama’s boy heading off to his first day of eighth grade. Movies that shout out their premise in the title are generally something to be wary of, and The 40 Year-Old Virgin is the sort of concept you’d expect to see Rob Schneider stuck in after bottoming out in Deuce Bigalow: Man-Whore in Bangkok.
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