Will Ferrell plays a grown man in a green costume who has never seen a city, never ridden an escalator, and never met his father. Jon Favreau’s Elf asks you to accept that premise for 97 minutes. It mostly earns the ask, though not always for the reasons it seems to think.
Elf is a 2003 Christmas comedy directed by Favreau and written by David Berenbaum. It stars Ferrell as Buddy, a human raised at the North Pole by Santa’s elves, who learns at 30 that he is not an elf at all and heads to New York City to find his biological father. New Line Cinema released it in the United States on November 7, 2003. It grossed $232.9 million worldwide against a $33 million budget.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
Buddy Climbs Out of the Sack
The setup is brisk. On Christmas Eve, a baby from an orphanage crawls into Santa’s sack and is carried back to the North Pole. The elves name him Buddy, after his diaper’s brand label, and Papa Elf adopts him. He grows up believing he is an elf. At 30, he learns the truth.
Papa Elf tells him his birth parents are Walter Hobbs and Susan Wells. Susan put him up for adoption before her death. Walter works for a publishing company at the Empire State Building and does not know Buddy exists.
Buddy walks into that building and finds him. Walter mistakes him for a Christmas-gram messenger and has him thrown out. That scene is the film’s engine: a man in yellow tights being escorted from an office by security, still cheerful.
Bob Newhart plays Papa Elf with a dryness that keeps the North Pole scenes from turning to syrup. Ed Asner’s Santa is gruff and tired, which suits a movie that treats the workshop as a workplace.
Gimbels, Jovie, and a Store Santa
Buddy lands at a Gimbels department store, where he meets Jovie, played by Zooey Deschanel. She is unenthusiastic about her job. He is unenthusiastic about nothing.
Hearing Santa will visit the store the next day, Buddy redecorates it overnight. Then he sees the store’s Santa and understands it is a man in a costume. He causes a brawl, and Walter bails him out of jail afterward. Artie Lange plays the department store Santa on the other end of it.
Walter takes him for a DNA test. The test confirms Buddy is his son. Favreau himself cameos as the family doctor who runs it.
The doctor speculates that Buddy is trapped in a childlike state of dependency. He suggests Walter take him home to meet his stepmother Emily, played by Mary Steenburgen, and his half-brother Michael, played by Daniel Tay.
Walter Hobbs Has a Deadline
Walter’s company is failing after its latest book flops. His boss, Fulton Greenway, played by Michael Lerner, expects a new book by Christmas Eve. Lerner plays Greenway as a controlling, uncaring executive, and the film treats him as its villain.
This is the strand that gives Elf its spine. Walter is not a bad man so much as a busy one, and Caan plays him with a flat, tired impatience that makes the fantasy land harder.
Buddy beats a gang of bullies in a snowball fight. Michael bonds with him after that and helps him ask Jovie out. The stepbrother subplot works because Tay plays Michael as a kid who needed someone strange to show up.
Peter Dinklage appears as children’s book author Miles Finch. Amy Sedaris plays Walter’s executive assistant, Deb. Andy Richter and Kyle Gass play Walter’s writers Morris and Eugene.
- Will Ferrell as Buddy
- James Caan as Walter
- Bob Newhart as Papa Elf
- Ed Asner as Santa
- Mary Steenburgen as Emily
- Zooey Deschanel as Jovie
- Daniel Tay as Michael
- Peter Dinklage as Miles Finch
The tagline is “Discover your inner elf.” That is the whole thesis, and the film states it without much shame.
What Ferrell Does With It
Ferrell’s performance as Buddy was praised by critics, and it is the reason the movie survives its weaker stretches. He plays Buddy without irony. The character has no second layer, no wink at the audience, and Ferrell commits to that completely.
The risk is obvious. A grown man behaving like a child for 97 minutes could be unbearable. Ferrell makes it warm instead, mostly by playing Buddy as sincere rather than stupid.
Favreau’s direction is unfussy. He lets Ferrell hold a shot. The North Pole sets look deliberately artificial, which is the right call: the fantasy should look like a diorama, and New York should look like a cold, loud place.
The film runs 97 minutes and does not waste much of them. It is a comedy, family, fantasy picture, and it keeps those three plates spinning without dropping one for long.
Where Elf Sags
The middle drags. Once Buddy is installed in Walter’s apartment, the film cycles through the same joke: Buddy does something odd, the family reacts, Emily says they should take care of him until he “recovers.” That beat repeats more than it develops.
The Central Park crash sequence brings in an NY1 reporter, played by Claire Lautier, and an eyewitness, played by Matt Walsh. It is a plot turn more than a scene, and it arrives late.
There is also a version of this movie that is meaner and funnier, one that lets Walter stay unlikable longer. Elf pulls its punches. It wants you to like everyone by the end, and it gets there by softening rather than earning.
None of that is fatal. It is the difference between a good Christmas film and a great one.
The Verdict on Elf
Elf has been called a modern classic and is often listed among the best Christmas films. That reputation is bigger than the movie. What Elf actually is: a very good star vehicle with a thin script, a strong supporting cast, and one performance holding the whole thing upright.
The Broadway musical Elf: The Musical followed in 2010, and NBC’s stop motion special Elf: Buddy’s Musical Christmas followed in 2014. The film’s afterlife is real, and it is built on Ferrell, not on Berenbaum’s plot.
The parts that matter are the ones people quote. Buddy in the mailroom. Buddy on the escalator. Buddy mistaking a department store Santa for the real thing and treating it as a betrayal worth fighting over. Those are Ferrell’s scenes, and they work because he never lets Buddy know he is the joke.
Caan deserves more credit than he gets. He plays the straight man in a movie that badly needs one, and he never signals that he is above the material.
The snowball fight is the film’s best-constructed sequence because it pays off something the movie set up: Buddy’s elf training is absurd, and it is also useful. That is the one place Elf connects its fantasy to its reality with any rigor.
What holds Elf back is that it never commits to a real conflict. Walter’s job is in danger, but the film resolves that with a burst of Christmas spirit rather than a choice. Buddy’s belonging is the question, and the answer arrives because the plot needs it to.
So: a 6.6. Ferrell is excellent, Newhart and Asner are good, Deschanel is underused, and the script is thinner than the film’s reputation suggests. Elf is worth watching every December. It is not the best Christmas film ever made, and the gap between those two things is the whole review.
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