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Elf

By John Anderson | Staff Writer

10:54 AM EST, November 6, 2003

(PG). A very BIG boy raised among elves heads for New York City to find his birth father. Both goofily sophomoric and smartly hilarious, it just may become that rare thing, a Christmas classic. With Will Ferrell, Zooey .Deschanel, James Caan, Bob Newhart, Ed Asner, Mary Steenburgen, Daniel Tay. Written by David Berenbaum. Directed by Jon Favreau. 1:30 (rudeness, mild language). At area theaters.

Christmas Movie walks into a department store, sits on Santa's lap. Santa says, "What do you want, Little Movie?" Movie says, 'I wanna grow up and be a FRANCHISE!!!" So many do. So many fall flat on their overly earnest, sappily plastic, tinsel-littered backsides, relegated forever to the Blockbuster Bargain Bin, public domain and the occasional bad print, interrupting commercials on local cable. "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." "Ernest Saves Christmas." "Jingle All the Way." "Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation." A lot more ho-hum than Ho-Ho-Ho.

Not "Elf," though. "Elf" possesses all the potential longevity of "A Christmas Carol," "A Christmas Story" or (dare we say it?) "It's a Wonderful Life." There's no argument that it lacks the gravity of the Frank Capra perennial (although there is one moment-of-utter-despair scene on a bridge that seems awfully familiar) and it isn't Dickens and it isn't Jean Shepherd. But it is very smart, consistently very funny and, like the elevator ridden by our awestruck title character -- who wants to stop at every floor -- if you've got buttons to push, this movie will push 'em.

Like Jack Black in "School of Rock," Will Ferrell may never have a better role, or one more tailor-made to his particular goofball talents. As Buddy, who as a baby crawled into Santa's bag at the orphanage and wound up at the North Pole, Ferrell is part slapstick clown, part naif and part human sight gag; the part is unimaginable with anyone else. As the only baritone in the Elf Choir, and the kid who never fit in (because he literally never fit in), Ferrell does guileless and awe-struck the same way he does George W. Bush, as a person blithely unaware of his own mental impairment. It might have been cruel, of course, but Ferrell does dumb with such abandon he just sucks you into his vortex of stupidity.

And he's hardly left to his own devices, after all. He has Ed Asner, a suitably crusty Santa whose Clausometer (which measures the goodwill on which his sleigh runs) has gotten so low he's had to install turbos. Bob Newhart is the slightly beleaguered Papa Elf and opens the film, narrating Buddy's quasi-sad story with his usual mix of bemusement and irony, telling how the lad wound up in a place where he'd be three times the size of everyone else and still not realize he was human. Told his own story -- how his unwed mother, now dead, gave him up for adoption, and how his father never even knew about his birth -- Buddy decides to head to Manhattan and seek out Dad. Dad will be less than amused.

At this point, the movie becomes a yuletide "Big," with the oversized Buddy contending with revolving doors, escalators, kamikaze taxi cabs, the moral affront of a department store Santa and one lovely salesgirl, Jovie (Zooey Deschanel), who will be won over by the big lug and even sing "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" outside the Plaza Hotel while Central Park rangers, resembling the black-hooded horsemen of "Lord of the Rings," try to enforce an unhappy ending on a very happy movie.

No such bad luck. Christmas movies are required to have one heart changed and/or melted, from the relative pushover (Maureen O'Hara's character in "Miracle on 34th Street") to the all-but-irredeemable (Ebenezer Scrooge). Here, the converts, like the three bears, come in three grades: Easy -- as in Buddy's sweet-natured stepmother (Mary Steenburgen); Tough -- as in his new stepbrother, Michael (Daniel Tay), who doesn't believe in anything; and Intract.able -- as in Walter (James Caan), a children's book editor so cheap he won't recall a story that's gone to the stores with two pages missing. Caan is a slowly simmering instant parent, who is as irked by Buddy's effeminate elf suit as he is by the fact that his son serves him spaghetti with maple syrup. But cheer has a way of catching up with even the flintiest heart in a movie like "Elf," which, like the rising Clausometer, is a pretty healthy measurement of good- will and unadulterated sentiment.