Little Big Man

Gentle giant: Will Ferrell as the oblivious man-elf Buddy.

Will Ferrell is an elf with a heart as big as he is: 6-foot-3.

by Sam Adams

In Elf, Will Ferrell is a big baby -- or close to it. A human raised in Santa’s workshop by elves too polite to reveal his real origins, Ferrell’s Buddy grows up (and up, and up) oblivious to the fact that he doesn’t fit in. Sure, he can’t make toys with the others’ inhuman speed, and towers over them at 6-foot-3, but as Buddy bounces gleefully on the lap of his suffocated-looking elf guardian (a digitally shrunken Bob Newhart), you have the feeling nothing could ever shatter his blissful obliviousness.

It can't last, of course, and it doesn't. An overheard comment alerts Buddy to his human parentage: His real father abandoned him to an orphanage (whence he stowed away in Santa's sack) after Buddy's mother's death. By any standard, Buddy's world has been turned upside down, but he adjusts so rapidly it hardly seems like an adjustment at all. Despite the fact that his real father, even worse than being human, is on Santa's "naughty" list, Buddy will journey to the big city and seek him out -- just like that.

On Saturday Night Live and in the few movies that have used him well, Ferrell has excelled at playing characters whose sense of the world is impervious to the world itself: Think of the husky, erudite naturist who blithely relates the joys of his lovemaking to an ever-more-disgusted audience, or the Austin Powers henchman who gives a dispassionate play-by-play of his own torture. In an odd and even selfish way, Ferrell's characters can't help being true to themselves. Having grown up in a world apparently without guile (though Elf slyly undercuts the notion of the North Pole as a candy-coated paradise), Buddy seems incapable of learning duplicity, or recognizing it in others. When he walks by a greasy-spoon diner with a tatty sign reading "World's Best Cup of Coffee," Buddy bursts in the door and yells, "Congratulations! You did it!"

Played by a marvelously pinched-looking James Caan, Buddy's dad has no such compunctions. A children's book publisher who's succumbed to pressure to watch the bottom line, he rejects the option of reprinting one storybook just because the last page is missing -- the kids can figure it out on their own. He's no Scrooge, though; Elf doesn't have any bad characters, just misdirected good ones. From the pained frown on Caan's face, you can tell he doesn't like being bad (or a bad father, either); he's just misplaced his better angels.

The running gag in Elf is that Buddy's total lack of self-consciousness, rather than being a vulnerability, makes him all but unstoppable. When Buddy's father responds to the arrival of his long-lost son by calling his secretary in for a hushed conference in the corner, Buddy, far from sensing the discomfort in the room, pokes his head in and confides, "Yeah, I like to whisper, too." Likewise, after he's accidentally found work as a department-store elf at Gimbel's (whose resurrection is part of the movie's faintly nostalgic tone), Buddy bulldozes his way into a friendship with his antisocial co-worker, Jovie (Zooey Deschanel, repeating her performance from The Good Girl in an elf suit), by being deaf to her blunt brushoffs.

Director Jon Favreau, working from a script by David Berenbaum, is on shaky ground here, and he knows it. Yesterday's touching fable is today's insufferable schmaltz, and the cynicism-into-sap about-face of many a sitcom-inspired big-screener is too transparent to pack much punch. Elf tries, and mostly succeeds, to strike a delicate balance between the sweet and the bittersweet. (Put it this way: Santa Claus is played by Ed Asner.) At times, it merely seems as if Favreau has upended his bag of tricks into the movie projector: A tribute to the Rankin-Bass Frosty the Snowman cartoons is heartfelt but feels awkwardly placed, crammed in for kitsch value and a fleeting laugh. The moment when Buddy emerges from the world of make-believe and attempts to hug an all-too-real raccoon seems to have been clipped from another far less inventive movie.

Like many an SNL performer, Ferrell doesn't always seem to know when he's gone too far, which is part of what makes his performance in Elf such a delightful surprise. There doesn't seem to be any calculation in Ferrell's adoption of Buddy's childlike approach to the world; Ferrell just opens himself up, as the best actors do. Throughout his SNL career, Ferrell drew comparisons to Chevy Chase, but here, he's closer to Jimmy Stewart. The way Stewart made you believe in invisible rabbits, or American democracy, Ferrell makes you believe that a human being can eat nothing but candy, then stay up all night making paper snowflakes.

Still, the most thrilling moment in Elf belongs not to Ferrell, but to his leading lady. Jovie has resisted Buddy's repeated efforts to get her to sing, claiming it will raise her spirits, but as he's wandering through Gimbel's one night (after doing some impromptu decorating), he hears a voice echoing through the halls, which turns out to be her, singing in the shower. (The hot water is out at her apartment, which explains the foul temper.) You might expect some gamely sung snatch of some vaguely recent pop hit: What you get is Deschanel trilling a perfectly lovely "Baby It's Cold Outside," in a voice that makes you wish it was still de rigueur for movie stars to sing. For a few seconds -- after Buddy joins in, but before Jovie realizes there's someone else in the bathroom with her -- it's a perfect duet, made somehow more so by Ferrell's distinctly ordinary voice. That's the blend of magic and real Elf strives for, and when it works -- well, it's Christmas.

Elf

Directed by Jon Favreau A New Line release Opens Friday at area theaters

recommended