by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I wanted to run my recently
acquired DVD of the 2003 Christmas comedy Elf, starring Will Ferrell as Buddy Hobbs, a human baby
who stowed away in Santa Claus’s toy sack one Christmas Eve and was raised by
Santa’s elves, Papa Elf (Bob Newhart — and the sight of him in the green tunic
and yellow tights that are standard elf drag is weird enough in itself!) in
particular. But he’s aware of the identity of his real (human) father, Walter
Hobbs (James Caan, portlier than we remember him from his Godfather days but still an accomplished actor), a put-upon
executive of a children’s book company who’s so out of touch with the Christmas
spirit that he ships a book with two blank pages so anybody who reads it won’t
know the fate of the pig and the penguin who are its central characters, simply
because he doesn’t want to spend the $30,000 on a reprint. Walter lives with
his wife Emily (Mary Steenburgen) and their son Mike (Daniel Tay), and Buddy
manages to find his way out of Santa’s kingdom at the North Pole and make it to
New York City and into the Empire State Building, where he crashes his dad’s
office and gets escorted out by security.
Though David Berenbaum seems to have assembled rather than actually written the script — there
are plenty of references to other Christmas stories, including A Christmas
Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street (much of the action takes place at Gimbel’s
department store — which had already gone out of business when this movie was
made! — and, like Santa in Miracle, Buddy points out all the mistakes the store’s decorators have made in
their depiction of the North Pole) — he and director Jon Favreau have
constructed a marvelous showcase for Ferrell’s antics. Elf is pretty much a one-joke movie — the joke being
Buddy’s fish-out-of-water response to the normal human world — and I couldn’t
help but wonder how Buddy was able to do things (like take his human-raised
human girlfriend to dinner) that require normal human money when there was no
evidence that he ever obtained any, either legitimately or otherwise — but at
least the one joke is genuinely funny, the movie avoids any blatantly dirty
gags (thank goodness) and there are some nice zingers. When Buddy redecorates
the Gimbel’s North Pole to more closely resemble the real one (and makes a
convincing replica of the Empire State Building out of Lego blocks!), the
department manager (played by a corpulent Black actor named Faizon Love, who
was born in 1968 in Cuba — though he looks older than that on screen — and was
raised in Newark, New Jersey and in San Diego) immediately gets suspicious and
thinks the Gimbel’s management has brought in a professional decorator and his
job is in jeopardy.
The plot resolves itself through a gimmick Berenbaum seems
to have ripped off from Peter Pan — it turns out that Santa’s sleigh is powered by a turbine engine
someone in the elves’ workroom developed after there was no longer enough
Christmas spirit in the world to make it go the old way (the idea is that now
so few people believe in Santa Claus the sleigh can’t remain aloft just on
Christmas spirit and reindeer power anymore), and the engine falls out of the
sleigh on Christmas Eve night and lands in Central Park, stranding Santa there
until Buddy can be summoned to re-install it. So Buddy’s girlfriend, Jovie
(Zooey Deschanel), implores the crowd surrounding Central Park (which the
police have closed off and intend to send a horseback patrol to push the
mysterious visitor out of there) to start singing “Santa Claus Is Coming to
Town” to provide enough Christmas spirit to get Santa’s sleigh going before the
horse-mounted park rangers catch up with him and either arrest him or just run
him down. (It’s as close as they could get to “clap your hands if you believe
in fairies” without getting sued by that children’s hospital to which Sir James
M. Barrie willed the rights to Peter Pan.)
Eventually — as we might have predicted — Buddy wins his father’s love
and Walter saves his job by publishing Buddy’s story as a children’s novel, and
there’s a bittersweet parting scene as Buddy takes off in Santa’s sleigh and
leaves Jovie behind (though Will Ferrell is hardly in Chaplin’s league in the
pathos department!) as well as a nice gag in which Buddy’s (half-)brother Mike
reads from Santa’s list (a large book bound in leather like a Gutenberg Bible)
and tells Carolyn Hutton (Lydia Lawson-Baird), the newscaster who’s covering
the event live for Channel 1, that what she’s told Santa she wants for Christmas is “an
engagement ring, and for my boyfriend to stop putting me off and commit
already!” There’s also a nice scene at the publishing company in which,
desperate for a best-selling idea, they hire the eccentric, egomaniac writer
Miles Finch (little-person actor Peter Dinklage), whom Buddy mistakes for an
elf, and when Miles takes that as an insult and physically attacks Buddy, Buddy
says, “He must be a South Pole elf.” Elf is a genuinely funny movie that’s well worth seeing — perhaps because
it was aimed at a family audience (it was rated PG “for some mild rude humor
and language”), it avoided the potty jokes of some of Ferrell’s other movies
and was all the funnier for dodging the raunch — and I was pleasantly surprised
at how good it was.
