Jon Favreau wanted his Christmas comedy Elf to become a Christmas classic.
Actually I’m kind of surprised it hasn’t yet. It has all the elements needed to
establish it firmly in the canon. The reason I say Favreau wanted that is
because it looks like he went out of his way to give it the look and feel of
other classic holiday fare from both film and television. In this unusual and
often uproarious story of a human raised by North Pole elves who goes to New
York City seeking out his real father, Favreau’s direction keeps the comedy
coming at consistent intervals while also injecting the right amount of
sentiment. He never pushes the sappy stuff too hard, but it’s strong enough to
give you a good feeling. David Berenbaum’s screenplay deserves credit for the
straightforward plotting, some damn good jokes and an appropriate level of
holiday spiritedness.
Elf takes it
for granted that Santa Claus exists. He is not a child’s fantasy perpetuated by
parents, but a real guy whose team of elf helpers prepare his toys and work on
his sleigh, which is itself powered by Christmas spirit. Or it used to be
anyway. Nowadays it requires a rocket booster because people don’t believe like
they used to (possibly due to a dearth of Christmas classics produced since the
television special “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” in 1970). One night a little
baby in an orphanage crawls his way into the toy sack, unbeknownst to Santa.
Not discovered until arriving back home, the baby is given the name Buddy,
adopted by Papa Elf, and grows up to be Will Ferrell. After failing to be any
good at meeting quotas for toy making, Buddy learns he is not – to his great
horror – an elf. This prompts a journey of self-discovery and to meet his dad.
Normally I’m not a Will Ferrell fan. He provides a brand
of comedy that is far too self-aware. I don’t like comedy that announces itself
as funny. But in Buddy, he’s found a character that suits his talents and
style. Because Buddy is a complete naïf, Ferrell can play over the top without
begging believability. When he mistakes a man with dwarfism (Peter Dinklage)
for an elf, he unleashes a string of otherwise horribly offensive comments, but
which in context are just about the funniest thing the movie has to offer.
To help ensure the movie’s status as a perennial classic
(even if it hasn’t paid off yet), Favreau uses traditional effects in the North
Pole sequences. To show the size difference between Buddy and the other Elves
he employs forced perspective, a method that keeps the film looking real and
not doctored by computers. The North Pole scenes also rely on the visual style
of those old TV specials like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and the
aforementioned “Santa Claus,” which used stop-motion animation. Elf does use some CGI to render the
animation, but giving the objects and characters the movements of stop-motion
creatures. The effect is to take us back to those TV specials we enjoyed as
children. To me that look just feels like Christmas. Additionally, the casting
of Ed Asner as Santa and Bob Newhart as Papa Elf help hearken to the period of
those classics. Both TV stars in the 60s and 70s, Asner and Newhart call to
mind another time and place.
That’s all well and good for providing the right look,
but a real holiday classic earns its place through feelings of good cheer, warm
memories and Christmas spirit. The real message of Elf is all about that. It’s about a man whose path has crossed both
worlds and brings a sense of revival to the people, most importantly to his
father (a delectably crabby James Caan), who is so busy with his professional
life that he’s losing his teenage son, a fact that has not been lost on his
wife (Mary Steenburgen), who reacts with surpassing understanding at the news
that her husband has an adult son they never knew about.
Of course Buddy’s journey wouldn’t be complete without a
little love interest. She comes in the form of the radiant beauty of Zooey
Deschanel as Jovie, a “North Pole” staffer at Gimbel’s department store where
Buddy exposes the sitting Santa as a man sitting “on a throne of lies.” Their
first date can go in the history books as one of the weirder movie dates ever
committed to celluloid.
Elf succeeds
because it doesn’t ever pander for either cheap laughs or cheap sentiment. It’s
not tacky, it’s not kitsch, and it’s never mean-spirited. Ultimately it’s the
performances that really sell it. The cast of Ferrell, Deschanel, Caan, and
several others make us believe in their characters, and play it strong enough
that we might almost, if we really want to, believe in Santa too. Or to at
least return to a simpler time in our lives when we did believe in such
fantasy.
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