Things I knew about Elf going in:
- Will Ferrell is Buddy, the elf
- He tells a mall Santa that he sits on a throne of lies
- Ed Asner is Santa
- James Caan is here
- Someone says, “I hope you find your dad!” in a voice my niece likes to imitate
- Joke about the food groups being syrups and whatnot
Things I did not know:
- Bob Newhart!
- Amy Sedaris! Andy Richter! Others!
- The following:
Buddy is a baby in an orphanage. Santa comes down the chimney on Christmas Eve, and Buddy crawls into his bag of toys and is accidentally taken back to the North Pole, where Bob Newhart Elf raises him. They name him Buddy because it’s the brand name of his diaper. This part all feels like speedrunning a movie premise, but it’s not as if I wish it were more drawn out.
Buddy doesn’t fit in with the other elves, due to being Ferrell-sized. He finally learns from an overheard conversation that he’s a human, and he decides to go to New York to find his human dad, despite a warning from Santa that said dad is on the naughty list and may not be all Buddy hopes.
I guess because this film has become such a juggernaut, I was expecting more — not more quality necessarily, just more MOVIE. Everything feels cardboard-thin, from the North Pole sets to the plot and characters. Everybody is a type, and not even a fully realized version of that type. Zooey Deschanel is somewhat tepid on Christmas in general, as you would expect a retail employee with no apparent family to be, but she’s not actually unfriendly to Buddy or averse to his charms, even at first. James Caan is supposed to be the money-hungry, heartless executive who neglects his family; he is a little gruff, but the wrongest thing he does in the whole movie is knowingly order a book to go to print with pages missing. He’s barely perturbed when a thirty-year-old man shows up claiming to be his son and name-drops a long-dead lover, nor is he convincingly put out by Buddy’s eccentricities when he moves in. His wife isn’t put out. Their son is very briefly put out, but comes around when Buddy saves him from a notorious gang of Central Park snowballers, which is the kind of thing that happens in this movie. There’s no villain and no real conflict. Buddy is hardly even a factor in the climax, when the main characters have to gin up some Christmas spirit from jaded New Yorkers to fuel Santa’s malfunctioning sleigh. I think the moment that best sums up the movie is the montage where Buddy goes to town decorating Gimbel’s department store for Christmas… which plays out as if the store isn’t ALREADY decorated for Christmas. The movie wants him to be at odds with the world he finds himself in, but he’s really not. He’s just a bit much.
As for the comedy, Buddy acts like a giant baby throughout the movie, which doesn’t really make sense — he is thirty years old, even if those years were spent at the North Pole, and there’s no reason he couldn’t have learned to read social cues from elves just as well as from humans. But there isn’t as much Will Ferrell mugging as I was afraid of, and I did laugh a couple of times. With a few exceptions, notably Peter Dinklage being dragged in for the kind of gag Peter Dinklage doesn’t have to do anymore, the movie’s humor is so bland and inoffensive you can’t get mad at it, even if it isn’t actually funny.
So I can see why Elf has found its way into what I gather is one of its main functions these days: background noise for Christmas activities. But I can’t see anyone regarding it as a classic if they didn’t first see it as a kid.