Posts by David Annandale

One Christmas Eve, an infant crawls into Santa’s sack while the big man is visiting an orphanage, and isn’t discovered until Santa (Ed Asner) is back at the North Pole. Adopted by the Papa Elf (Bob Newhart), the baby grows into Buddy (Will Ferrell). Though Buddy does his best, he is enormously clumsy by elf standards. He decided to head off to New York City to meet his birth father (James Caan), the Scrooge-like editor of a children’s book publisher. Buddy descends on the big city with infectious naivete, and has no end of misadventures while he tries to inculcate the Christmas spirit back into his father.

This was a delightful surprise, infinitely better than the uninspiring trailers had led me to believe. Ferrell is the very incarnation of bouncing, wide-eyed, über-innocence, and his collisions with NYC realities are frequently side-splittingly funny. There are numerous extremely quotable lines, and the syrupy sentimentality that plagues most self-consciously Christmas-oriented movies is largely kept to a minimum. The forced perspective in the North Pole scenes is howlingly obvious, but the fanciful production design makes up for that flaw. The case has been made (convincingly, I think), that there have been no legitimate Christmas classics made since1983's A Christmas Story. It is, of course, far too early to tell how Elf will stand the test of time, but its mix of sharp wit and child-like whimsy makes it a serious contender. It is also entirely fitting that Peter Billingsley, the star of A Christmas Story makes a cameo here as the head elf.