3 gibbles out of 5

Director: Jon Favreau

I bet this movie is all sorts of aces if you’re home alone and happen to land on it on TV in between masturbatory sessions.  And if you’re reading this review in the future, when TV is a dated concept, then reading has probably become passe also and all the reviews I’ve written have been churned up to create fuel for future internets, so I should really stop trying to take every possible continuum into account when I write these things.

It should be noted that I’m not automatically laughing when I see Will Ferrell in a movie.  He doesn’t annoy me, and I find his brand of humor, generally, funny, but the mood of his films are hit or miss for me – if I’m not on board for the first laugh, then I’m stuck in a chuckle for the majority of the movie.  But ‘Elf’ is still cute, which is all it aims to be, I think.

We’re told a story by Bob Newhart about a human child who is accidentally brought into Santa-land, where, yes, Santa lives, along with his many elves.  The kid’s all cute n’ stuff and he doesn’t have any parents to go back home to, so he is raised as an elf.  And he turns out to be giant-man Will Ferrell, camera-tricked to look even more giant amongst the tiny elves.  Then one day, Mr. human-elf Ferrell is told to go back to New York to find his birth father, James Caan.  So the entire movie is a whole buncha fish-out-of-water jokes, along with some fart humor.

What sells it, and what, I imagine, makes it work really well if you’re in the right mindset, is how mostly innocent it is.  It’s a completely PG movie and Ferrell pushes his wide-eyed enthusiasm to the limits to swing all of what could be mean-spirited humor into foolishness.  Director Favreau certainly deserves some credit here as well, pitching the tone between classic Rudolph-style Christms cheer and modern day (at the time) poo-jokey kid humor.  And Caan brings a similar balance to the father, making him just evil enough that we can really appreciate his slow turnover to the holiday spirit.

It all adds up to one of those rare Christmas movies that doesn’t have to push so hard to get its obvious message across, and thus works as a yearly movie retreat.  By the same token, it doesn’t do much with its high-concept to really blow the genre out of the water.  You know, it’s just sort of cute.

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