PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 8/19/05)

It's difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when the screwball comedy dove willingly into the rabbit hole of inanity, abandoning wholly the side of the continuum characterized by concepts like "humanity" and "cleverness," and redlining on the side where "insensitivity" and "fart jokes" reside. Not to suggest the latter have no place in such movies. They are, after all, what they are. But at some point, let's put it sometime in the mid 1980s, such comedies took absolute leave of reality, heaping cheap joke upon cheaper joke, until all that was left was two hours of Rob Schneider in a leisure suit, dodging overweight, or peg-legged, undersexed women, while audiences presumably laughed nonstop at the thought of the silly little bug-eye as a "man-whore."

Restoring much-needed balance to the genre is The 40 Year-Old Virgin. Steve Carell, a sometime bit player in all the right comic circles (The Daily Show, Anchorman), takes the lead as Andy Stitzer, a generally good-natured, stunted peon who spends his days as a retail drone in a strip mall electronics box called Smart Tech, and his nights in his tiny apartment, cooking elaborate meals for one amidst a collection of originally packaged Aquaman dolls, framed posters of 80s prog rock bands, and painted Dungeons and Dragons action figurines. Stitzer seems content to live out the rest of his days in the world of sexual innocence, until he's invited to a late night poker game with his overgrown fratboy coworkers, where he's outed as a, well, you know.

The setup is nothing we haven't seen before, but as we all know, good comedy rests in the delivery, and it's been a long time since such nuanced delivery has been practiced in such a film. As Stitzer moves from playing Halo and reading Iron Man comics into the world of Irish Car Bombs and drunken "hood rats," Carell plays it perfectly, never slipping into caricature, preferring to let the over-the-top moments merely happen around him as Stitzer comes to the slow realization that, to his peril, he's merely trading one form of immaturity for another. One gets the feeling Carell's performance is of the type Adam Sandler wishes he could have given in his 90s comedies, if only he could have figured out how to dial it down when it mattered.

Stitzer's possible salvation comes in the form of Trish (Catherine Keener), a single mother who is repenting for having jumped too early into her sexuality by trying to play it straight in the land of beige. Even in the service of silliness, no one plays tragic, desperate, and beautiful better than Keener, who together with Carell, makes this film both laugh out loud funny and humane. It is perhaps too much to hope for a 40 Year-Old Virgin-inspired revolution to sweep through the land of the screwball comedy, but it's certainly not wrong to suggest that if it did come, such movies would be better because of it.—Ryan Devlin