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.
Once Buddy is in New York living with his emotionally unavailable father, played by James Caan, and his morose half-brother, the picture goes for redemption and becomes more and more thumpingly forgettable. There are incidental pleasures--Mary Steenburgen as Caan's wife is beautiful and composedly mature, and Zooey Deschanel (daughter of the great Black Stallion (1979) cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and the actress Mary Jo Deschanel whose scene over the phone with Ed Harris in Philip Kaufman's adaptation of The Right Stuff (1983) was the highlight of that bustling spacejock movie) is piquantly down-in-the-mouth. Deschanel truly seems to know what it's like to have a job so bad you don't even want to joke about it. But she doesn't come across as helpless, and a hint of touchiness keeps her from being pathetic. The only good moment not connected specifically with the human-elf material is when Buddy quietly sings the male part of Frank Loesser's insinuating duet "Baby, It's Cold Outside" along with Deschanel while she showers. When the sketch inspiration fails, as it does with Buddy's eating habits--for some reason he likes spaghetti, topped with candy, and maple syrup over the whole mess--there's nowhere to turn for help.
Most of the characters Buddy meets in New York are depressed and, being culturally an elf, he has to try to lift their spirits. Caan doesn't really respond to the hands-off, moneygrubbing half of his character (and his material isn't very developed as comedy, so there isn't much to respond to), and what could Caan bring to redemption? But that's nothing compared to the way the movie ties Christmas spirit to a belief in Santa Claus. Borrowing from the fading of Tinker Bell in Peter Pan and the stop-action TV short Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindoor, the movie tells us that Santa's sleigh now needs a jet engine because it was designed to run on belief in Santa which has critically waned. So when the overtaxed reindeer crash land in Central Park, Buddy's half-brother grabs Santa's book from the sleigh and reads out what people want for Christmas to a news reporter on the scene in order to revive the faith. Luckily all the people whose names he reads are watching that channel and when they hear the list their rejuvenated Christmas spirit makes the sleigh fly again.
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