[Unpublished]
I don’t know when I’ve felt so ambivalent about a film. Let me first warn that it’s relentlessly foul and vulgar, so don’t think I’m encouraging you to run out and rent it. The DVD has been extended 17 min, so it’s even more raw than the film shown in theaters. But at the time of the Oscar nominations a couple of critics said that, if the Academy didn’t have indie-itis, and if comedies in general were not regarded as lesser films, this should have been considered for best film. If you could somehow filter out the crudity, it would indeed be very funny. And it actually has some interesting and appealing characters. Yeah, if it wasn’t so raunchy, it would be a very likeable movie.
But I consider it potentially an example of the tide turning and just beginning to come back in, in the sexual revolution. I’ve always thought that this would happen in a way that didn’t include any explicit component of rediscovered faith or morality; it would just be the pendulum reaching the end of the arc and coming back, and the practical reasons behind old-fashioned values being rediscovered and reconsidered in a positive light. That’s definitely what happens here. In fact, my friend Terry Mattingly comments that if you ripped out the crudity, this movie could have been made by Focus on the Family.
The story concerns Andy (Steve Carell), the title virgin. He’s never had sex; after a couple of disastrous encounters in his teens and twenties, he just stopped trying. After that it became such a big deal that he was frozen. Three guys who know him from work make it their project to “help” him—but it’s clear to the audience that all three of the guys are screwed up in different ways. Their promiscuity clearly isn’t making them happy or wise.
Eventually Andy falls in love with Trisha (Catherine Keener), a divorced woman his age, who has children and even a grandbaby. She runs a service that helps people sell things on eBay, and she is helping Andy sell his extensive vintage collection of action figures. They begin dating, and decide to wait 20 dates to have sex. When the big night arrives, Trisha pushes Andy down on the bed where they have been packing the toys. But he jumps up and starts picking up the scattered toys, talking about how important it is not to damage them, how important it is not to “violate the integrity” of the packaging. He says, “Do you know how hard it is not to open a package like this?” The message is, surprisingly enough, about the intrinsic value of virginity. Not that having sex might result in pregnancy or disease; it’s that virginity itself is a precious thing, worth preserving.
After some misunderstandings Trisha and Andy break up, and Andy tries once again to get rid of his unwanted virginity efficiently by having sex with a willing, kinky girl he meets in a bar. But after they go to her apartment and she begins to undress, the audience can see Andy kind of fade out; you can see that he feels like something is really wrong, and he wants to get away. At this point his three friends (improbably) show up in the apartment. They tell him that if he loves Trisha, he must not have sex with this woman; he has to save himself for the one he truly loves. That’s another appearance of a pretty surprising message.
So Trisha and Andy reconnect. Everything stands still for the big moment when he delivers the line that is the message of the whole movie: “I always thought there was something wrong with me because I had never had sex. But now I know—I was just waiting for you.”
Andy and Trisha marry, and he loses his virginity on his wedding night in a funny and delightful closing scene that extends over the credits. After watching the movie I went back and skimmed through, listening to the commentary. At this point the director said that he wanted to make it clear that not only was the sex great, it was actually better than anyone else ever has, just because Andy waited.
This is not a message you often get in Hollywood movies, is it? But because the raunch is just about continuous, no Christian publication can come out in its favor. Which is probably just as well.
There is also a pro-life moment. One of the guys learns that his girlfriend is pregnant, and he displays the baby’s sonogram on an entire wall of TVs at the electronics store where he works. The whole gang sit and watch, and talk about the images. “This baby is only 4 months old!” We see the baby moving in the womb on multiple screens. It’s pretty unavoidable that an unborn child is a valuable life.
Not long ago messages like these would have been radioactive in Hollywood; they would have been registered as morally conservative, and hence unacceptable. But conservative morality has been so thoroughly beaten that now some of the innate sense it makes can begin to reappear in the mainstream.
Oh, another thing: there’s a comedian in the cast, a older Pakistani, named Gerry Bednob. There is something really creepy about this guy. He has the foulest mouth of everyone, and is just not very funny; the whole joke is that this little old guy is saying foul stuff, which comes out in a torrent. All through the movie I felt uneasy whenever he was on. At one point in the commentary, Steve Carell talks about a scene where Gerry was ad-libbing a stream of obscenity at him. Carell says, “Something came over you! You changed into a completely different person. Your eyes glazed over, and turned this demonic red.” Hmmmm.