'Elf' (2003)

There is, allegedly, room for everyone on the Nice List

By the time this piece goes live, it will have been just over 12 hours since I watched Elf for the very first time. This revelation has already earned me an appalled facial expression from my roommate, of which I suspect I haven’t seen the last of just yet. Perhaps you, dear reader, are Exhibit B.

Now, it might not be entirely true that I’ve never seen Elf before; for all I know, it was one of those movies that my late elementary-to-early middle school teachers rolled in for the class Christmas parties. I was only there for the junk food, which, in hindsight, should have made me somewhat partial to Elf.

Hold your tomatoes; I’m not exactly saying that Elf is bad. I’ll explain in a bit.

Elf stars Will Ferrell as Buddy, a human who was accidentally brought to the North Pole as a baby, and who subsequently grew up among Santa’s elves whilst being raised as one himself. His world spins out of control when he learns about his past, prompting him to set off for New York City in search of his dad, Walter (James Caan), who does not even know Buddy exists. Armed with inexhaustible enthusiasm and the ability to find joy in anything and anyone, Buddy injects some holiday cheer into a world that’s in desperate need of it.

I’d wager that, if Elf came out today, it wouldn’t be anywhere close to the instant classic status that it seems to enjoy right now. The reason for that is because, on its surface, it seems to follow the same gameplan of the rightfully loathed Harold and the Purple Crayon; you have a grown man whose fantasy world origins make him a childlike fish out of water in the real world, and who then proceeds to get up to some fantastical, marginally-connected shenanigans with Zooey Deschanel and the rest of his friends.

As a result, neither film has much in the way of plot, character, or a sincere emotional core. They even arguably share the same comedic thesis; a grown man excitedly and loudly breaks social etiquette, and the people around him respond with irritation, disbelief, amusement, or some combination of the three. But that’s just the text; there’s no structural backbone to the comedy, and so it largely hinges on crossing its fingers that a majority of its scattershot gags will land with you. That’s too rickety an approach to work effectively; I myself chuckled maybe twice throughout.

All this, and yet, Elf works. Better yet, it works because it has none of these fundamentals, rather than in spite of that.

Pay attention to how Buddy is characterized; generally speaking, he listens whenever someone tells him to do something, but if anyone tries to tell him that something is a certain way, he stubbornly insists otherwise (his North Pole argument with the manager of Gimbels is a key example of the latter). Moreover, he has an unwavering love for the world around him, and not only does he want to experience all of it, but he wants everyone around him to experience it, too.

Indeed, Buddy is defined by the superior reality that he occupies relative to most all of the other characters. That’s where Elf owes its charm, and it’s why Ferrell’s performance in the role has been as praised as widely as it has; his unwavering commitment to Buddy’s reality is key to making that reality so appealing to us.

Because, really, who wouldn’t want to be able to experience life with all the wonder and whimsy that Buddy so clearly does? More importantly, why do so many people reject it? Miles Finch, after all, boasts an inner logic that’s equally as disruptive and imaginative as Buddy’s, and yet everyone goes out of their way to accommodate him in spite of his meanspirited cynicism, while Buddy finds himself getting snubbed more often than not.

That’s the heartbeat of Elf; it challenges structures and institutions and mindsets that we’re expected to accept as correct (the diegetic, societal ins and outs of New York City, but also technical filmmaking fundamentals like plot, characterization, and comedy), and instead places its faith in an amorphous love for life itself. To this point, it’s no accident that the film makes a point to show respect to the perspective of children; Michael, Buddy’s half-brother, is quickly won over by Buddy, while Walter is chewed out by his boss after his decision to remove two pages from a children’s book (because “they only look at the pictures anyway”) winds up tanking the book on the market.

But it’s Buddy’s tiny scene with Carolyn, the little girl that Buddy meets at a hospital, that’s quite sneakily one of the film’s most important scenes. Carolyn readily accepts Buddy’s reality, not on the basis of the details he presents, but because of the emotion that his reality allows him to occupy. That is precisely why we’re supposed to cherish Buddy’s reality, and children are privileged in the sense that the world of stock markets and rat races hasn’t yet dampened their ability to understand what truly matters within and between each of us (that is, of course, a broad generalization, but I should think my point gets across here).

This is all to say that Elf probably isn’t as good as you remember, nor is it as good as everyone around you claims to remember. The good news, however, is that Elf is good in a way that you probably don’t remember, just as we all occasionally struggle to remember what it was like to be a child that was so well-acquainted with wonder. My question is, why do we set ourselves up to struggle with that?

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