Elf (2003)

Official trailer

Elf is Jon Favreau’s 2003 American Christmas comedy about Buddy, a human raised among Santa’s elves at the North Pole, who travels to New York City to find his biological father, an embittered children’s-book publishing executive. Will Ferrell plays Buddy. James Caan plays Walter Hobbs.

Zooey Deschanel plays Jovie. Mary Steenburgen plays Emily Hobbs. Daniel Tay plays Michael Hobbs. Edward Asner plays Santa. Bob Newhart plays Papa Elf. Faizon Love plays the Gimbels manager. David Berenbaum wrote the screenplay.

New Line Cinema produced the film for theatrical release in November 2003. Elf was Jon Favreau’s second feature as director after Made in 2001.

Will Ferrell playing a grown man who thinks he’s an elf should have been unbearable, and instead he had me grinning through nearly the whole film. Elf is the Christmas comedy from the 2000s I’m happiest to recommend. My reservation is that the father-son plot runs on rails, and the last act leans harder on Christmas-card sentiment than the rest of the film needs.

The film’s central comic premise depends entirely on Will Ferrell’s commitment to playing Buddy with complete naive sincerity.

Buddy believes himself to be an elf throughout the film. His enthusiasm for Christmas is genuine, his belief in Santa is unwavering, and his social inability is a direct consequence of having grown up in a workshop instead of in human society. Ferrell plays every beat without irony. The film’s eventual emotional weight depends on the audience’s willingness to accept Buddy as the film presents him, and Ferrell’s commitment to the character makes that acceptance possible.

Will Ferrell’s Sincerity

Ferrell’s Buddy is among his strongest performances and a hugely successful Christmas-comedy lead character of the 2000s. The character requires sustained childlike enthusiasm without ever tipping into either cynical comic distancing or sentimental softening. Ferrell never breaks his commitment to Buddy’s worldview. The film’s central tonal balance depends on the performance.

The Gimbels department-store sequences allow Ferrell to play Buddy’s wonder at human-world Christmas decoration as real instead of ironic. The sugar-content escalations, the spaghetti-with-syrup dinner, the elf-elf encounter with Peter Dinklage’s children’s-book author character: each Buddy scene depends on Ferrell holding the character’s specific energy without comic commentary.

The syrup-on-spaghetti dinner is the scene that sold me. Ferrell eats it with such total, happy conviction that I laughed and felt a little queasy at once, and that one scene tells you everything about how he plays Buddy.

James Caan’s Walter Hobbs

James Caan’s Walter Hobbs is the film’s necessary counterweight to Buddy’s enthusiasm. The character is selfish, professionally cynical, dismissive of his second-marriage family, and entirely unprepared for the arrival of his adult son in elf costume. Caan plays Walter with full commitment to the character’s coldness. That gives Walter’s eventual reluctant reconciliation with Buddy its actual weight.

Walter’s relationship with his current son Michael provides the secondary emotional structure. The father-son dynamic that Walter has failed to maintain with his current child gets a second chance through Buddy’s arrival. The screenplay’s actual subject is family reconciliation across multiple generations, and Caan’s performance carries the heavier dramatic material that Ferrell’s comedy can’t address.

Caan is the performance I appreciate more than I enjoy. He refuses to soften Walter one inch before the script lets him, and I think that restraint is what keeps the film from turning into a greeting card.

Jon Favreau’s Direction

Favreau brought a particular visual sensibility to the North Pole sequences that distinguishes the film from contemporary comedy production. The Rankin/Bass-inspired stop-motion-effect production design at the North Pole, the practical-effects approach to Santa’s sleigh, the deliberately old-fashioned visual signature: every choice connects the film to the classic Christmas-special tradition instead of to early-2000s comedy aesthetics.

The decision to use Edward Asner as Santa and Bob Newhart as Papa Elf grounds the film in the voices of classic American comedy. Asner’s Santa is gruff and practical instead of jolly.

Newhart’s Papa Elf narrates Buddy’s origin with the comedian’s signature stammering uncertainty. Both performances signal the film’s commitment to traditional Christmas-comedy values instead of contemporary-comedy energy.

The North Pole scenes are the part of Elf I like best. The old-fashioned stop-motion look and Newhart’s stammering narration feel like a Rankin/Bass special come to life, and I’d have happily spent more of the movie up there.

Is Elf worth watching?

Elf gets an 8 from me because Ferrell never blinks, Caan gives him something solid to push against, and Favreau dresses the film up like a classic Christmas special. The Deschanel duet is a sweet bonus. The deduction is for a father-son story that goes exactly where you know it will and a sentimental last stretch that gets a bit sticky. None of that stops me from recommending it to families with kids of any age.

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