Will Ferrell in Jon Favreau's Elf: Spaghetti with Syrup
In Todd Phillips's Old School (2003) Will Ferrell plays a newly married guy who can't resist the call of the frat-house antics his wife assumes he left behind when he married her. He works on his muscle car in the driveway with the radio blasting, and though he promises not to overdo it at a kegger he goes to without her, as soon as some college kids tease him for his restraint he starts chugging and ends up streaking through town (alone though he thinks the whole party has followed his lead). The problem is that he hasn't realigned himself with his wife, as he claims and as he believes. The problem is not that she's a prig; she's actually the star pupil in a blow-job class that she and her girlfriends take from a prancing queen. (In a miserably written, cast, and staged sequence--why do all the wife's friends seem like mid-price escorts?) He just doesn't want to grow up in the way she expects despite the fact that anyone looking at Ferrell would think, Suburban Dad, not, Party Monster.
That's the only joke in Old School that works: Ferrell's physical equipment is all wrong for the adolescent decadence he's wedded to. Towering but gawky, and doughily slow to respond, he's not young, lean, muscular, or hot enough for it, which is why it's funny he thinks the whole party is behind him--no one would want to run behind naked Will Ferrell.
The only joke that works in Jon Favreau's Elf, Ferrell's first starring vehicle, works in the opposite way: Ferrell's physical equipment is all wrong for the childlike innocence of an elf in Santa's workshop. Ferrell does an amazing job of playing the innocence straight; the joke never veers into burlesque seaminess (promised this season by Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa). We laugh because although his character Buddy is a human who has come by chance to be raised by elves in the North Pole, and is thus an oversized misfit among these little people, he's as naturally full of Christmas spirit as any of them and there's so much more of him behind that spirit.
In movies Ferrell has so far been terrific because of a tricky limitation: he eliminates everything from his face so we can trace the impact of a single overwhelming emotion which then rocks his body. It's the very fact that his body is an inexpressive instrument that his movements are so funny, and it's how he creates character. He's in the line of descent from Jerry Lewis, throwing himself into powerhouse slapstick with no acrobatic ability.
Ferrell gives an inspired one-note performance in Elf and the movie is good to the extent it sticks to its sketch premise. Elf shows that it doesn't matter if there's minimal continuity to the story as long as the series of things that might happen to a human elf in Manhattan (where Buddy comes to find his natural father) are cleverly conceived. But it isn't like the Austin Powers movies, which treat plot and character as just more droplets in the constant stream of clever ideas flowing right on the surface. Mike Myers can work in a mode in which there are quotation marks around the quotation marks. Elf seems at first more poised between irony and sincerity, because Ferrell is funny only to the extent that he's so improbably innocent. (What keeps it from cloying is that he's also graceless and obnoxious, but somehow miraculously doesn't overdo either.) But then the movie gives in to "sincerity," and believe me, those are my quotation marks not the movie's. It turns into the kind of smarmy family entertainment that emetically gave rise to Mike Myers's thoroughgoing irony.
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