Review: Elf

Will Ferrell stars as Buddy, a human who through complicated circumstances ended up being raised in the North Pole and working with the elves in Ed Asner’s...er...Santa’s workshop making toys. This secret has been kept from Buddy all his life, believing that Papa Elf (a wonderfully deadpan Bob Newhart, who also narrates) is his real father. Despite Buddy having grown into a freakin’ ginormous mutant elf. His clumsiness and lack of toy-making skills see Buddy as a bit of an outcast, and one day he overhears so snarky elves refer to Buddy as a human, and the penny finally drops. He ventures to NYC to reunite with his real father, a grinchy publisher of kids’ books played by James Caan, who is married to Mary Steenburgen, and father to Daniel Tay. Initially, the grumpy Caan dismisses Buddy as a crazy loon, but then he shows him a photo of his real mother, and one paternity test later, well he can no longer dismiss him. The goofy guy in the elf suit is really his son, and before long, Buddy is staying with the family. He also lands a job as an elf to a department store Santa, leading to the obvious ‘imposter’ gag. It’s there Buddy meets cute ‘elf’ Jovie (Zooey Deschanel), who is at first resistant to his peculiar, child-like charms, but...well, if you’ve ever seen more than one movie in your lifetime, you know the deal. Faizon Love plays Buddy’s hostile boss at the department store, and lots of familiar faces turn up throughout, including the film’s ever-so humble director.

 

Directed by Jon Favreau (“Made”, “Iron Man”) and scripted by debutant David Berenbaum, this 2003 family Christmas comedy could’ve been a whole helluva lot worse. It’s nice, sweet, and features two pitch-perfectly cast leads in Will Ferrell and Zooey Deschanel, but being cute don’t make it especially good. It would be a whole lot lesser without Ferrell and Deschanel. I mean, who else but Deschanel could believably play opposite this Ferrell character? I can’t think of anyone else.

 

The film is at its best at the beginning. Given the film’s plotline has faint echoes of Rankin/Bass’ stop-motion Yuletide classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (which I have managed to watch most Christmases since I was a kid), it’s no surprise to see Favreau and Berenbaum paying homage to Rankin/Bass in the opening, right down to the very Burl Ives-esque Frosty the Snowman, voiced impeccably well by Leon Redbone (more on him later). Hell, the character of Buddy even has some traits of the elf who was ridiculed by all the other elves for wanting to be a dentist, in the aforementioned holiday classic. Some of the humour is also quite subversive and funny. Bob Newhart’s dry narration is funny, Ed Asner is an appropriate choice for Santa, and Ferrell’s terror at having to open jack-in-the-boxes is hilarious. There’s no doubt that some of this is very, very stupid, and oversized Ferrell’s prat-falling and slapstick humour gets old after a short while (as does his wide-eyed innocent act), but a lot of this early stuff is funny. In fact, it’s the only funny portion of the film, as the rest turns into a kind of lame “SNL” sketch about a giant tool who thinks he’s an elf. The humour is basically about 80% family-oriented and 20% subversive, and if they bumped up the latter a bit more, the film would be much more accessible to those too old to believe in Santy Claus. No doubt, kids will find the majority of the film perfectly enjoyable, and in theory, this is as perfect a vehicle for Ferrell as you’re gonna find, and isn’t exactly unpalatable in practice, either. It’s just that I’m a bit old for most of what it offers. I’m not really a fan of fish-out-of-water comedies, and that’s what this film mostly turns into (Great Bigfoot gag, though). Except this is more like a fish taken out of the water, raised out of water, and then thrown back in at the deep end. So technically, Farrell’s out-of-water even when in the water.

 

I am absolutely a fan of Zooey Deschanel in a cute Santa’s helper outfit. She steals the film with her charm, beauty, and whatever else it is that she has that no one else seems to have. Whatever your stance on her, you can see here why she ended up getting her own sitcom. Casting isn’t exactly this film’s problem, though I found James Caan an odd fit with Mary Steenburgen. Caan’s OK as a Grinchy-type, and Steenburgen is the perfect maternal figure for Ferrell’s wide-eyed innocent character, but one can’t help but think Steve Martin (in “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” mode) would’ve been the better choice to be paired up with Steenburgen. Charles Grodin, maybe. I guess Favreau wanted to work with Sonny Corleone. I understand, but Caan’s simply not very funny and it’s kinda important. Meanwhile, Faizon Love was a lot funnier on Favreau’s “Dinner for Five” than in this (It’s a family film, so perhaps that limits him somewhat). Peter Dinklage, meanwhile, is one of those rare actors with a disability who can appear on screen in the ‘token....’ role, and despite his size being the gag, by the end of a scene his talent shines through as an actor so much so that he makes you pay attention to him as an actor. Yes, I say this in the context of his role here as the ‘angry dwarf being mistaken for an elf’, but even so, I was more impressed by how well he played the scene (which is one of the only funny moments away from the North Pole) that I almost missed the gag that was staring at me in the face.

 

It’s just that the film should never have left the North Pole, because the only thing that truly keeps one interested after that is the delightful Deschanel. I mentioned earlier the participation of one Leon Redbone. Mr. Redbone collaborates with Ms. Deschanel over the end credits with an absolutely awful version of ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’. And it’s all Redbone’s fault, because Deschanel sings the song briefly on her own earlier in the film and is quite a good singer. But Redbone is shockingly bad, affecting a grating heavy baritone singing voice that isn’t even remotely convincing or organic-sounding. Meanwhile, is it just me, or were the Christmas decorations in this movie really cheap and ugly-looking?

 

This is a nice, harmless film. Better than some Ferrell films (“Old School”, “A Night at the Roxbury”, “Semi-Pro”), worse than others (“Stranger Than Fiction”, “The Other Guys”, “Everything Must Go”), and probably on par with “Blades of Glory”. It could’ve been so much worse, it’s watchable at the very least but it’s not an annual Christmas classic for me.

 

Rating: C+