Hilarious Christmas fun

Rating: 8/10 (15 December 2015)

Jon Favreau's Elf is as snappy as holiday comedies come, mainly thanks to Will Ferrell's pretty damn hilarious performance as Buddy, a human baby stranded in the north pole and raised by pint sized elves as one of their own. Ferrell can be overbearing at times with his often hard to swallow brand of abrasive humour, but there's always moments where he reigns it in, sticks to the script and gives us magic. I think that this being a family film dictates that he especially needs to play it close to the chest and gives him a comedic track to run on without derailing into the desperate realm of cringy improv and sticking to the screenplay's wonderful jist, and not smothering it in ego and comedic decadence. It's a wonderfully sweet script as well, seeing Buddy travel from the north pole to bustling Manhatten to locate his long lost human family. His cranky birth father (craggy, immortalized James Caan) wallows in lukewarm disbelief as Buddy follows him everywhere, including back home to spend time with bis wife (Mary Steenburgen) and kids. He sorta kinda finds work in a mall due to his inherent elf-ness and gets himself into all kinds of trouble, until he catches the eye of a hired elf played by adorable Zooey Deschanel, who's got herself a case of the Christmas blues. Ferrell's upbeat, manic tone combined with Zooey's dry, laconic yet amused personality makes for perfect chemistry, especially in their odd, compelling rendition of 'Baby its cold outside'. Buddy blunders his way from one austere NYC situation to the next with shiny naivety and blind, trusting optimism to hysterical payoff, a dynamic which sits at the core of what's made the film so successful over the years. The only bad note for me is a terrifying animated version of the north pole that looks like Wallace and Gromit got drunk on rum and eggnog and dreamt some creepy version of Santa's homestead, complete with eerie talking seals. Director Favreau participates in a cameo as Caan's family doctor, Edward Asner shows up as a jolly enough Santa, and Bob Newhart steals many laughs as Buddy's awkward surrogate elf father.