In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week we take a look at Elf, the holiday comedy that put Favreau on the map as a feature director, and made Will Ferrell’s grinning face a household name.
*long exasperated sigh*
As the host of one of the longest-running Christmas movie podcasts on the internet, I am contractually obligated to have an opinion on Elf. So let’s go ahead and rip the band-aid off now: I hate Elf.
Okay, okay… ‘Hate’ may be too strong a word. Saying you hate Elf feels like saying you hate puppies or ice cream or… I dunno… Christmas.
I don’t *hate* Elf in and of itself, though. And I didn’t hate it when it first came out either. In 2003, it was a fresh and entertaining bit of holiday silliness. The cult that’s sprung up around it in the decades since, on the other hand, is something I find just plain creepy1. Then again, this seemed to happen with everything Will Ferrell touched for most of the 2000s. Show me a millennial who doesn’t regularly quote Old School or Anchorman or Step Brothers (or Elf for that matter), and I’ll show you a damn liar2.
The movie itself is a sweet, goofy little film about how caring so much about the thing you love can change the people around you. It’s an admirable message; heartwarming, really. But the way Elf is marketed, even twenty-plus years later, is so much more offputting and sinister than the movie it represents. The image of Will Ferrell’s overly energetic mug, straining to force the most ungodly of smiles, comes around every holiday season and turns me off from the actual movie all over again. What Warner Bros. sells you every Christmas is the idea of an overbearing manchild who seems hellbent on ruining your life because he thinks it’s funny. If that had actually been what the movie was, basically a holiday version of Clifford, it might have been interesting. It wouldn’t have been the megahit that it became, but at least it would be interesting.
You know how this story goes. Do I really need to recap it?
I’ve just been told that I actually do have to recap it, and there definitely isn’t a gun being held inches from my face by a man in a Buddy The Elf mask, so let’s get to it…
One Christmas Eve, a baby orphan stows away in Santa’s sack of toys and soon finds himself back at the North Pole. He eventually grows up to be Buddy (Daddy’s Home‘s Will Ferrell), the tallest elf in Santa’s workshop. When Buddy’s supervisor (Ralphie himself, Peter Billingsley) informs him that he’s different from the other elves—some Lord of the Rings-style forced perspective makes him tower over everyone else in the room, for starters—Buddy has a nervous breakdown and his adoptive father (Bob Newhart, also our narrator) has to break the news that his real father is a curmudgeonly book publisher living in New York City. So Buddy goes to New York, reunites with his father Walter (James Caan), runs afoul of a department store manager (Made‘s Faizon Love) and falls for one of the employees there who also happens to be dressed like an elf (Zooey Deschanel).
There’s a fish out of water story here where Buddy’s irresistible force butts up against the immovable object of everyday New Yorkers. It’s a similar dynamic to what would become the standard trope of the Hallmark Movie: The big city jerk has to be shown the true spirit of Christmas from a small-town true believer. It’s just in this instance it’s literally a North Pole elf going to New York to shake everything up. This, naturally, makes Walter’s life a living hell, and threatens to tear the family apart until Walter finally snaps at Buddy in the middle of a Christmas Eve business meeting. This causes the quantifiable amount of Christmas spirit in the world to drop perilously low (because that’s the sort of thing that happens in Christmas movies), and Santa’s sleigh literally drops out of the sky into Central Park.
The third act turn where Buddy suddenly has a crisis of faith (and has an It’s a Wonderful Life moment where he briefly considers jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge) feels like a necessary turn in this story, but the resolution just plain doesn’t work for me. He witnesses Santa crash landing in Central Park, and it’s up to Buddy and Walter to a) make up with one another, b) retrieve and repair the jet engine that powers Santa’s sleigh, and c) distract the Central Park Rangers, villains that the movie suddenly makes up because all of this needs to be a chase sequence for some reason.
The Central Park Rangers are a bridge too far for this movie. I understand that they needed something, some way to end this silly little Christmas movie. Apparently the original idea for the finale involved Buddy being chased down Fifth Avenue by the NYPD in a high speed chase, where the cops are shooting at Buddy, but also BUDDY SHOOTS BACK. This would have been a wild ending, and I take it the budget just wasn’t there for that kind of insanity. So you scale it down as far as you can until you’re left with a bunch of black-clad riot cops on horseback. And sure, let’s shoot them like the Nazgûl from Lord of the Rings. It’s 2003 and we’re a New Line Cinema production. Who’s gonna stop us?
So instead of a wild shootout on the streets of Manhattan, we get Will Ferrell running from a couple of horses while the rest of his family coaxes a crowd of onlookers to sing “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”, which raises the Christmas Spirit level and helps Santa escape. “The best way to spread Christmas cheer,” we’re told, “is singing loud for all to hear.” This, incidentally, is exactly what saves the day in Ghostbusters II, another movie about how New Yorkers just plain fucking hate each other.
The bulk of the story is about Buddy trying to melt his father’s cold, black heart with silly shenanigans and Will Ferrell’s obnoxious manchild schtick, but Elf‘s real charm is in capturing New York City at Christmastime. Filmed in December of 2002, Elf is one of the defining films of the immediate post-9/11 era3. As much as it’s a vehicle for Will Ferrell to cut loose and do his thing, it’s also a love letter to the Big Apple at Christmas, a plea for New Yorkers of all stripes to come together in peace. But also just the sights and sounds of the season, ice skating under the giant Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, snowball fights in Central Park, running through department stores decked out in holiday trimmings… Elf feels like a Christmas episode of Saturday Night Live, with all the holiday backdrops of New York that come with it. It’s hard to deny the allure of the city lit up in Christmas lights on a snowy evening, and this movie knows that.
Elf is, ultimately, too sweet and gentle a production for me to truly hate it. A lot of that comes from Jon Favreau. He uses the movie as an opportunity to make a love letter to the holiday movies he loves. The design of the North Pole, its elves and critters, is straight out of the Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. And of course, with Peter Billingsley onboard as a producer, there was no way he wasn’t going to appear on-camera, his first role in a Christmas movie in twenty years (though definitely not the last, we’ll see him again soon). His approach with this movie feels too sincere to account for the cynical way the movie’s been marketed years after its release. My misgivings with any of that have nothing to do with him.
Will Ferrell famously refused an eight-figure paycheck to return for an Elf sequel, and from everything I’ve read a lot of that stems from his refusal to work with Favreau again. That wild, guns-blazing shootout finale they originally envisioned? That supposedly came directly from Ferrell and then-writing partner Adam McKay. That’s not the movie Favreau wanted to make, and I get the impression that if given the reins, Ferrell would have made Elf a far more aggressive, mean-spirited kind of movie. And this coming in the same holiday season as Bad Santa? It would have been too, too much. As recently as 2017, Favreau was still interested in doing a sequel, so Will Ferrell being the holdout tells me he’s not interested in doing the sweet, friendly Christmas movie all over again4. All the creepy, wild-eyed Buddy merchandise that’s been circulating in the years since? That’s the Buddy Will Ferrell wants out in the world. That’s the Buddy that I hate. I hate it so much. Get it out of my face.
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
I didn’t realize it in the Daredevil piece, but 2003 is a pretty big year for our boy Favs. He’s got three films all releasing within a month of one another, with varying degrees of involvement. Of those three, this one is easily the most consequential. Elf proved to be a monster box office hit, and to this day is pretty roundly recognized as part of the Christmas Movie Canon.
With this movie, Favreau proved he could deliver a big, four-quadrant hit, the kind that studios salivate over like greedy vultures. He would get another effects-driven movie to direct soon enough, and we already know the wheels are turning with his associations with Avi Arad and the folks at Marvel. Stay tuned for more of that.
FINAL RATING
3 stars (out of 5). S’fine.
NEXT TIME: Conversations kill.
- A family member owns a cardboard standee of Buddy, and displays it proudly in their home. Out of season. I’m the “Christmas all year round” guy and even I think that’s excessive.
↩︎ - Old School is terrible, but that hasn’t stopped “You’re my boy, Blue!” from entering my regular rotation of nonsense phrases.
↩︎ - Which is another reason why it’s truly difficult to be mad at this movie.
↩︎ - Shut up, Will Ferrell, you made Daddy’s Home 2. ↩︎
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