Beati Immaculati

A fool and his money, the saying goes, are easily parted. As are a fool and his virginity, those responsible for this wretched offering entitled The 40-Year-Old Virgin would have us believe.

Do not, however, simply take me on my word that this film is wretched. Rather, examine, as I have, the film's leitmotif: a modern version of the "problem play" so very popular in Elizabethan/Jacobean England (The Bard even wrote one and called it Measure for Measure), The 40-Year-Old Virgin invites us to consider Andy Stitzer's--the titular virgin's--condition as aberrant, strange. Having sex early in life, and having it often, then, is apparently as normative an experience for the typical American as his first NASCAR race or clean twelve-point-buck kill.

Andy Stitzer, on the other hand, has somehow managed to skip this quintessentially American initiatory rite -- a rite that inevitably brings one to the inestimable and inexhaustible pleasures of highly mediated consumerist hedonism -- opting instead for the hyperfetishism typical of those in a state of arrested development peculiar to pimply pre-adolescence and involving TV-show action figures left in their packaging. One, in other words, that centers on junk-culture collectibles, those relics of a more idyllic age when one's existence remained unimpinged upon by biological imperatives.

Andy Stitzer, with the aid of several friends and co-workers,is nevertheless lifted from the sociological bywater he has found himself in and brought to the golden shores of coitus.

As you can see, the above synopsis fairly captures the dramatic arc of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Thus, seemingly aware of this paucity (I couldn't help but think while watching the film that it could have been dispensed with much more deftly in a five-minute Saturday Night Live skit) the filmmakers liberally lard their product with gratuitous vulgarity and digressive, sophomoric badinage.

If you want to see palpable evidence of The Culture Industry's creative bankruptcy, then by all means watch this film. If, however, you realize that you will die one day, and that the two-plus hours which The 40-Year-Old Virgin will claim from you are too precious, too irreplaceable to be wasted, then find some other way to beguile your Friday or Saturday evening. Because, ultimately, the only thing The 40-Year-Old Virgin ends up screwing is the audience.