Movies -- Let's Start with the Virgin

She and I have gone to the movies a lot over the past few weeks. For the most part the films we have seen have been utterly undistinguished and unworthy of comment. A few had interesting features -- I would recommend only one of them.

I’m not going to bother with the dreck, except for one depressing effort. That is the 40 Year Old Virgin. It was terrible, but did a fair box office. I can only attribute that to the popularity of TV’s “Daily Show” which features the star, Steve Carrell. It also received fairly decent reviews, which can only be due to the fact that Catherine Keener is in it and delivers a predictably good performance [who knew she could be sweet?]. Other than that it’s pretty much a waste of time. Carrell, like many standup comedians, is an inept actor. He creates a likeable geek of a guy whose life is going nowhere and who retreats from confrontation with the real world by immersing himself in superhero fantasies. His co-workers [all of whom are competently played], decide to get him laid. There ensue plenty of opportunities for embarrassment, and that is what the movie is all about. We see the hero embarrassed, and then embarrassed again, and then again, and again…, and again…. You get the idea – imagine an interminable episode [as if there were any other kind] of “Frazier.” Oh, and did I mention, the film is filthy. Carrell and his associates seem to thing that watching a mousey little man scream obscenities is funny. It isn’t. It is an utterly forgettable film and I am a bit…, well, embarrassed to admit that I allowed myself to be dragged to it.

There is one serious point to be made here. The film does address a very real phenomenon – the insecurities of young to middle-age males who are not on the fast-track to success. The filthyness, as I have pointed out with regard to other gross-out comedies, is subversive and transgressive – a young man’s way of striking back against a world that prolongs adolescence [and the impotence that implies] well into middle-age. And the sexual anxiety Carrell portrays reflects accurately the demons that haunt young, single males who must try to negotiate the increasingly tricky terrain of social relationships in a feminized PC world that is increasingly hostile to them. In this sense casting Keener, the legendary ballbuster, as Carrell’s love interest is a stroke of genius as is casting the wonderful Jane Lynch as his tough as nails, and aggressively sexual boss.

“Virgin” thus speaks to the anxieties and experiences of an entire cohort of men who are being shunted aside in a competitive culture where the playing field is increasingly tilted against them, and apparently such as these are going to see it in droves, but people outside that demographic cohort are unlikely to be amused. “Virgin” really has nothing to say to old, married guys like me.

More later….