The 40-Year-Old Virgin Review

Judd Apatow's first feature as director rests on a decision critics keep returning to: the joke is never on Andy. The premise invites humiliation and the film declines it, letting Steve Carell play a man who is content, mildly embarrassed and entirely worth rooting for. Carell is the reason it works, and the improvised coworker riffing gives Paul Rudd, Romany Malco and Seth Rogen room to build actual characters out of what should be a chorus of hecklers.

The chest waxing scene is real and the reaction is real, and it is still the sequence everyone cites. What critics fault is the shape. At close to two hours the film sprawls, the riffing occasionally stalls a scene that had already finished, and the Catherine Keener romance gets crowded out by the ensemble it shares screen time with. The look is plain to the point of anonymity. None of that dents the affection, because the film's argument, that a decent man does not need fixing, is unusually generous for a genre built on shame. It made Carell a lead and set the template for the decade that followed.