Elf

        Remember when the TV networks filled the air before Christmas with animated holiday specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Director Jon Favreau clearly does, and in Elf, he has crafted an homage to Christmas shows of the past.
        Like those 1960s-era specials that reappear on our television screens each December, Elf opens with a delightful animated sequence. A storybook opens to a picture of “Papa Elf” reading, then dissolves into a live-action Papa (Bob Newhart), who begins to tell the story of a human adopted by elves.
        The human child, “Buddy” (Will Ferrell), soon dwarfs his adoptive parents and all the other elves, and is a hopeless misfit in the elfin North Pole culture. While his peers produce 1,000 Etch-a-Sketches a day, poor Buddy can only manage 85. His fellow workers, pitying his poor performance, tell him he’s “special.” Later, he discovers just how special when he overhears the other elves discussing his human parentage.
        The story that follows is pretty standard holiday fare: the misfit human elf sets off to discover the place where he really belongs, and en route his innocent belief and Christmas spirit redeem a selfish, cynical world and change the lives of key characters.
        The scenes at the North Pole are reminiscent particularly of 1964’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, complete with a talking snowman whose appearance and speech mirror the Burl-Ives-voiced character from that film. The theme of the misfit who saves Christmas is also borrowed from Rudolph, as is the scene of Buddy departing the Pole on an ice floe.
        When Buddy arrives in New York to reconnect with his biological father (James Caan), the story shifts to a blend of A Christmas Carol and Miracle on 34th Street. Buddy must help his father rediscover Christmas, and overcome the skepticism of worldly New Yorkers about the existence of Santa Claus. If he fails, Santa’s sleigh will never fly again.
        Well, of course he succeeds. I told you it was a holiday movie, didn’t I?
        We’ve been conditioned by popular culture to find grown men acting like children funny, and Saturday Night Live alumnus Will Ferrell proves a good choice as the human elf, Buddy. Special effects make Ferrell tower over ordinary-sized actors playing the other elves, and Ferrell’s adeptness at physical comedy conveys his discomfort with undersized classroom desks, doors, and rooms at the North Pole.
        The 6-foot-3-inch Ferrell is actually taller than most of the humans he encounters in New York, as well, so that the inner child he channels is especially incongruous in a world that seems, in this movie, to have lost all of the joy of Christmas.
        Many of the supporting actors, like the plot, are television fixtures: Bob Newhart as Papa Elf plays his familiar sitcom character; Ed Asner (Lou Grant) plays a kindly Santa. Even James Caan, as Buddy’s father, has been seen on TV more than in films lately. As the department-store elf whose life Buddy touches, Zooey Deschanel (Almost Famous) has just the right mix of skepticism and a desire to believe.
        The curmudgeon in me wanted to use this review to gripe about the increasingly early imposition of the (commercial) Christmas season on our culture – a Christmas movie released on November 7! But my companion and I, both middle-aged and not in this family film’s demographic, were both charmed into Christmas spirit by the feel-good story.
        So, though it is only November . . .’Tis the season to be jolly!