The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Anchorman

The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Anchorman – This 2004 comedy with Will Ferrell is a staple of cable TV and very well-known to most people. But I had never seen it before, a serious lapse in my cultural education. Ferrell acts the part of an ego-maniacal anchorman from the early seventies – at least if the musical cues are accurate – and the film is the story of his efforts to preserve his newsroom as an all-male domain against Christina Applegate, playing a perky, beautiful and aggressive lady newscaster. Produced by Judd Apatow, the picture has a plot of sorts and amusing characters. Apatow has made his career directing raunchy, vulgar comedies aimed at young men that are, also, sufficiently sensitive to appeal to women. This film establishes his trademark approach – Ron Burgundy is a benign monster, self-absorbed but capable of love, and he has weird, incongruous talents to boot: he plays jazz flute. Burgundy is sufficiently lovable to make his romance with the beautiful lady newscaster palatable. The film has pretentions toward addressing sexual harassment – but it’s the overt, crass harassment posited to characterize the early seventies and it’s not disturbing when the male gargoyles leer at the women and try to humiliate them; these scenes have the quality of a frat-boy fairy tale. After all, this kind of thing occurred a long time in the past when people and social mores were different – an approach to comedy that proposes that people in the seventies were simply more stupid than they are today. Love triumphs: Burgundy is redeemed and, after the manner of didactic sitcoms like Andy Griffith, learns his lesson through humiliation. In summary, the picture is like several conjoined episodes of the old Mary Tyler Moore show narrated from the perspective of Ted Baxter – it’s pleasant enough, mild satire without much bite, and engaging if you don’t have anything else to watch.