They Got It Wrong: Anchorman

Welcome to They Got It Wrong, an weekly series where I look at films over the years that have either received too much or too little praise from critics and audiences and attempt to argue why the consensus is wrong.  More often than not, I will be examining films that are overrated by critics, but I will also attempt to give some respect to films that may not have received it on initial release.  The entire history of cinema is fair game, so expect to hear me talk about films that came out when even movie studios saw 3-D as a gimmick.  The first film I will be examining is the one that has given me the most grief from my peers through the years, the 2004 comedy Anchorman.  I remember seeing it when I was on vacation in New Jersey with my mom and brother and hating it, but I figured it was because they did not like it either, so I decided to give it another chance after taking so much ribbing in school (it worked for Dodgeball). Almost a year later, I saw it again with about twenty or thirty people who all loved the film, and I realized that I was mistaken the first time: Anchorman is awful.  

And yet, the film was both a critical and financial success, garnering a 63 rating on Metacritic and a user rating of 7.1 out of 10 while grossing 84 million dollars domestically from a miniscule 26 million dollar budget.  Almost everyone I know absolutely loves this film and cites it as one of their favorite comedies, and on the surface, I can understand where they are coming from.  The film has so many elements that should work.  The producer, Judd Apatow, had already been an instrumental part of three beloved TV shows (Larry Sanders Show, Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared) and with the release of his directorial debut, The 40-Year-Old Virgin the following year, he would go onto become the biggest name in film comedy.  First-time director Adam Mckay was a long-time writer for Saturday Night Live and would go on to direct Step Brothers, one of the funniest films of this or any generation.  The cast was first-rate and up-and-coming, with stars such as Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, Vince Vaughn, and the lead, Will Ferrell, who had just finished a legendary career at Saturday Night Live.  The premise was promisingly zany and original.  A parody of chauvinistic 1970s' newscasts?  Completely out of left field!  

Alas, none of these supremely promising elements contribute to a cinematic comedy experience worth a damn.  This film is messier than the NBA labor situation.  There is no semblance of a coherent narrative, and the film is 94 minutes of letting the actors improvise and hoping something sticks to the wall, and unfortunately, none of these incredibly talented comedians comes away unscathed in this film.  Will Ferrell as the lead seems to operate under the notion that smugly gliding through every scene, preening for the camera, and talking in a different voice is hilarious.  On the contrary, it's rather insulting to the viewer's intelligence and, most damningly, it's lazy.  The rest of the cast indulges in similar mugging with the exception of Steve Carell, who as dim weatherman Brick Tamland goes in the complete opposite and aims for over-the-top earnestness and naivete but actually becomes a vacuous black hole of humor, believing that saying something that makes absolutely no sense in the scene is somehow funny.

The one funny scene in the film is probably its big centerpiece: the epic street fight between all of San Diego's news teams.  It maintains a wonderful balance between absurdity and reality, and the cameos by Luke Wilson and Ben Stiller as anchors for other stations are fantastic.  This scene would have been great as a sketch on Saturday Night Live or Funny or Die, the website Ferrell and McKay co-founded a few years after this film.  However, once the fight ends, any momentum the film had built up in that brief amount of time came to a screeching halt as we returned to Ferrell and company mugging for the camera.

Of course, all of this would have been forgiven if Anchorman had followed the golden rule of comedy: it has to make the viewer laugh.  The only time I laughed out loud was during the aforementioned fight scene, and the rest of the time, I found myself looking at my watch wondering when the film was going to end.  

I am going to cite Step Brothers, the third McKay-Ferrell collaboration after Talladega Nights, as a film that is in many ways similar to Anchorman, but is a much more pleasurable viewing experience because it made me laugh until I could not laugh anymore, and then it made me laugh some more.  Both films have obnoxious premises with ludicrous protagonists and rely heavily on improvisation from the actors.  But what makes Step Brothers much more successful than Anchorman is the sincerity of the performances from the films leads, Ferrell and the great John C. Reilly.  Anchorman is a very cynical film filled with cynical characters, and while that can work in comedy (see: early Woody Allen), more often than not, it's condescending to the audience, and I feel that is Anchorman's greatest crime. The film is too in love with its premise to bother creating characters we can both laugh at and laugh with.  No character establishes an emotional connection to the viewer, and therefore, he or she has no investment in the eventual fate of Ron Burgundy.  Comedy cannot solely rely on gags for it to be funny (which is why The 3 Stooges does not hold up well).  What films like Anchorman fail to realize is that character development is not just important in drama, it is equally important in comedy as well.  A character can do crazy things and spout humorous lines, but without a narrative arc, those jokes are rendered irrelevant.