cveawAny movie that features Seth Rogen in a prominent role is, by definition, a good movie. Rogen was, of course, one of the cast members of Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, two of the failed TV shows that director Judd Apatow ran before making the move to the big screen. The 40 Year-Old Virgin marks Apatow’s feature directing debut, and what he has done here is mix the funny-because-it’s-true style of his TV shows with the funny-because-it’s-wacky-style of his last producing gig, Anchorman. And he’s come up with a really great movie.

Rogen isn’t the star of The 40 Year-Old Virgin, though – Steve Carell is. He plays exactly what the title says; his Andy works days at a big electronics store and spends his nights alone in his apartment crammed with more toys and collectibles than the Knowles estate (not Beyonce). It’s not that Andy’s bad looking. He’s just shy and awkward with women. And it’s not like he hasn’t been in situations where sex was realistic to expect, but circumstance and his own doofiness worked against him, and after a while it seems like he just gave up. He’s not happy being a 40 year old virgin, but he’s pretty resigned to it.

One night, though, his fellow employees at the electronics store find out his shameful secret, and they make it their mission to finally get Andy some pussy. In lesser hands this would be sub-Porky’s fodder (actually, it would be just Porky’s), but Apatow manages to balance the film perfectly on the edge of high and low brow. OK, middle brow. Most amazingly of all, he never takes the film into the territory of mean comedy.

That’s what I ended up liking best about the film. Sure, it’s a fairly broad sex comedy, but it’s a sweet one. At the end of the movie everyone ends up happy. There are no bad guys, no comeuppances to be handed out. And the film doesn’t have a misogynistic bone in its body. Look at other current sex comedies, like the tsunami of hate that is Deuce Bigalow European Gigolo – the comedy is predicated on laughing at a succession of freaks. Apatow can’t laugh at the freaks – he wants to hang out with them.

I wasn’t sure that Steve Carell could front a movie. I’m still not. This is very close to being an ensemble piece, in much the same way that Anchorman was. There’s a lead, but most of the best stuff happens with Andy’s three co-workers; Seth Rogen as the stockboy, the always amazing Paul Rudd as the salesman still hung up on a trashy girl who dumped him two years before, and Romany Malco as the mack daddy who is constantly cheating on his girlfriend.

Malco was a revelation to me – I had never so much as set eyes on the guy here, and he comes very close to stealing the movie completely. His character, Jay, dances right on the edge of stereotype, in a very winking way. Malco’s timing and delivery is flawless, and he’s the perfect broad foil for the ever low-key Rogen.

What a joy to see Rogen get this much screentime. He’s played third or fourth bananas before on Apatow’s TV shows, and he appears in Anchorman for a nanosecond, but in The 40 Year Old-Virgin he proves he’s more than the bite size Abraham Benrubi. Of course I couldn’t help but wonder where’s the rest of the players – Lizzie from Undeclared shows up for a quick second, as do a few others, but Martin Starr is sorely missed.

Paul Rudd plays against type – or maybe just a character that’s an extension of a downward spiral from Wet Hot American Summer’s confident stud Andy to Anchorman’s clueless stud in his own mind Brian Fantana. Rudd’s fun because he has leading man good looks and charisma, but he’s great in silly character parts. Here his dissolution over his girlfriend from 2 years ago is endlessly hilarious. You have to respect any actor brave enough to shove a camcorder at his own bare ass.

Carrell’s take on Andy is often great, with some very sublimated rage occasionally boiling up to the surface, the kind of rage that’s understandable for a guy who’s never gotten laid. But he also plays Andy a little too literal at times, in a way that reminded me of Brick Tamland. Andy is socially retarded, but every now and again he seems just retarded. I know most of that is to set up a joke, but this 40 year old virgin is shockingly clueless about sex in this internet porn age.

As the film goes on, Andy meets a woman and slowly begins to fall in love. That woman is Catherine Keener, still in vulnerable mode from The Ballad of Jack and Rose. She’s beautiful as always, and funny, but there’s no real chemistry between her and Carell. As a result the scenes charting their romance – always destined to pale besides the hijinks of the three guys trying to get Andy laid – are the weakest in the film. The film is long, clocking in at about two hours, and by the end – when most of the scenes are about these two – you feel it.

Still, Apatow is careful to keep the comedy going. He never makes the mistake of fully backgrounding the three coworkers, and he has a handful of other eccentrics he’s always happy to sprinkle into the story.

A lot of people are going to compare The 40 Year-Old Virgin to Wedding Crashers. It’s inevitable – they’re both R-rated comedies, and they feature members of the current Hollywood Comedy Mafia. But they’re very different films, just as The 40 Year-Old Virgin is very different from Anchorman. It’s a real movie, for one thing. Crashers is more of a real movie than the absurdity fest of Anchorman, but it still places gags before characters. In The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Apatow shows off his easy with juggling the two. He’s cracked the code that has kept sex comedies a low brow, frat boy genre. Remember that scene in Boogie Nights when Kurt and Jack Horner are looking at the final edit of their first Brock Landers film? “It’s a real movie, Jack.” That’s exactly what The 40 Year-Old Virgin is, but it never sacrifices laughs.

8.7 out of 10