The 40-Year-Old Virgin
I hesitated seeing this film for a long time. I felt certain that it would be one long stupid cruel male bashing joke. But I have to admit that in spite of it's flaws, the film actually does work.
There are certainly plenty of things in this film that are in bad taste or just plain dumb, but ultimately it ends up working because it allows you to sympathize with both the guy and the woman he meets.
It's clear that the studio's marketing department played a heavy hand in the screenplay. Most fictional stories require you to temporarily suspend your sense of disbelief at at least one point, in order to allow the rest of the story to work. But the best writing generally relies on suspension of disbelief as little as possible. This film, on the other hand, requires suspension of disbelief in almost every scene. But I guess that's because the film's very concept requires total suspension of disbelief in the first place.
The lead characters are attractive nice people who can afford to live in nice neighborhoods, there's a near-perfectly P.C. mixture of ethnicities, and nobody ever really gets mean or ugly.
Andy's a stock clerk in the kind of home electronics store that's rapidly disappearing and being replaced by Walmart and Amazon. He can't possibly be making more than $10 an hour. And yet he rides a pretty expensive bike, has an apartment that must cost at least a grand a month, which he's packed with plenty of nice furniture and home entertainment stuff, and which always seems to look like a maid just came through the place. That sort of thing just wouldn't happen on a stock clerk's wages unless he was dealing on the side. But then, if he were a genuinely typical retail stock clerk, he'd probably have to live in a really cheap apartment furnished with thrift store furniture, in a lousy part of town, and the film wouldn't really work with that.
And of course, for the film to work, he also has to be a reasonably decent looking guy with a nice personality. If he were a real middle aged virgin, he'd probably have to be more like American Splendor's Harvey Pekar: a goofy slovenly doofus or an anti-social crank. Or both.
Oh, and wait...he's a reasonably healthy adult male with no regular sex partner, and he's not getting an erection every time he turns around? And he's not following nature's loud and clear instructions by regularly masturbating? And he's not using pornography to enhance that experience by several orders of magnitude? Sorry, that just wouldn't happen.
And Trish...exactly what the heck does she do? She sells other people's stuff for them, on consignment, on eBay? The kind of thing that my grandmother could do for herself? And for this she needs a big storefront on a busy street, with what would obviously be a huge monthly overhead? And she drives a Volvo and lives in a really nice house? And supports three kids? Exactly how many baby daddies are underwriting her lifestyle, anyway? And between running her "business" and dating, and with no apparent man in the kids' lives, what exactly are those kids doing, raising themselves?
Those things said, however, if you're willing to go along with all the film's conceits, there are some worthwhile moments as well.
One of the most annoying concepts in today's Hollywood is the idea that white males are the only people that can be shown in an unflattering manner. Showing anyone else in a less than 100% positive way is racist or sexist or homophobic. Well, this film bravely blows away that nonsense in spades.
Not only is our central character a really nice, likeable white guy who stays nice and likeable no matter how many ugly situations he gets thrown into, but a lot of the women he encounters are drunks, sluts, idiots, and just plain wack jobs. But it all works in the film, since it lets us see the difficulties of a nice decent guy trying to maneuver himself in today's post-feminist social environment.
And the gay jokes abound. There's a whole string of "You can tell you're gay because..." jokes that lots of films wouldn't get away with. But they work here, because sexual identity would clearly be an issue in a story about a middle aged straight guy who's never had a girlfriend.
Beyond that, there's a central theme in the film that nearly everybody can identify with, namely, performance anxiety. The idea is expressed throughout the film: you need to be sexually experienced before you meet the person you fall in love with, so that when you are finally with that person, you won't be quite so inept a lover. Of course this is largely a myth, but it's a myth that millions of people buy into. And the film blows that myth out of the water pretty nicely.
So this film could have been a completely humiliating male-bash, which would have been typical Hollywood. Instead, the guys in the audience end up rooting for our hero to get laid, and the women end up rooting for him to fall in love. And in the end, everybody gets the happy ending they were hoping for.
I hesitated seeing this film for a long time. I felt certain that it would be one long stupid cruel male bashing joke. But I have to admit that in spite of it's flaws, the film actually does work.
There are certainly plenty of things in this film that are in bad taste or just plain dumb, but ultimately it ends up working because it allows you to sympathize with both the guy and the woman he meets.
It's clear that the studio's marketing department played a heavy hand in the screenplay. Most fictional stories require you to temporarily suspend your sense of disbelief at at least one point, in order to allow the rest of the story to work. But the best writing generally relies on suspension of disbelief as little as possible. This film, on the other hand, requires suspension of disbelief in almost every scene. But I guess that's because the film's very concept requires total suspension of disbelief in the first place.
The lead characters are attractive nice people who can afford to live in nice neighborhoods, there's a near-perfectly P.C. mixture of ethnicities, and nobody ever really gets mean or ugly.
Andy's a stock clerk in the kind of home electronics store that's rapidly disappearing and being replaced by Walmart and Amazon. He can't possibly be making more than $10 an hour. And yet he rides a pretty expensive bike, has an apartment that must cost at least a grand a month, which he's packed with plenty of nice furniture and home entertainment stuff, and which always seems to look like a maid just came through the place. That sort of thing just wouldn't happen on a stock clerk's wages unless he was dealing on the side. But then, if he were a genuinely typical retail stock clerk, he'd probably have to live in a really cheap apartment furnished with thrift store furniture, in a lousy part of town, and the film wouldn't really work with that.
And of course, for the film to work, he also has to be a reasonably decent looking guy with a nice personality. If he were a real middle aged virgin, he'd probably have to be more like American Splendor's Harvey Pekar: a goofy slovenly doofus or an anti-social crank. Or both.
Oh, and wait...he's a reasonably healthy adult male with no regular sex partner, and he's not getting an erection every time he turns around? And he's not following nature's loud and clear instructions by regularly masturbating? And he's not using pornography to enhance that experience by several orders of magnitude? Sorry, that just wouldn't happen.
And Trish...exactly what the heck does she do? She sells other people's stuff for them, on consignment, on eBay? The kind of thing that my grandmother could do for herself? And for this she needs a big storefront on a busy street, with what would obviously be a huge monthly overhead? And she drives a Volvo and lives in a really nice house? And supports three kids? Exactly how many baby daddies are underwriting her lifestyle, anyway? And between running her "business" and dating, and with no apparent man in the kids' lives, what exactly are those kids doing, raising themselves?
Those things said, however, if you're willing to go along with all the film's conceits, there are some worthwhile moments as well.
One of the most annoying concepts in today's Hollywood is the idea that white males are the only people that can be shown in an unflattering manner. Showing anyone else in a less than 100% positive way is racist or sexist or homophobic. Well, this film bravely blows away that nonsense in spades.
Not only is our central character a really nice, likeable white guy who stays nice and likeable no matter how many ugly situations he gets thrown into, but a lot of the women he encounters are drunks, sluts, idiots, and just plain wack jobs. But it all works in the film, since it lets us see the difficulties of a nice decent guy trying to maneuver himself in today's post-feminist social environment.
And the gay jokes abound. There's a whole string of "You can tell you're gay because..." jokes that lots of films wouldn't get away with. But they work here, because sexual identity would clearly be an issue in a story about a middle aged straight guy who's never had a girlfriend.
Beyond that, there's a central theme in the film that nearly everybody can identify with, namely, performance anxiety. The idea is expressed throughout the film: you need to be sexually experienced before you meet the person you fall in love with, so that when you are finally with that person, you won't be quite so inept a lover. Of course this is largely a myth, but it's a myth that millions of people buy into. And the film blows that myth out of the water pretty nicely.
So this film could have been a completely humiliating male-bash, which would have been typical Hollywood. Instead, the guys in the audience end up rooting for our hero to get laid, and the women end up rooting for him to fall in love. And in the end, everybody gets the happy ending they were hoping for.
posted by dataguy at 5:29 PM
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