Selfish elves, a Santa kidnapping, and a candy-fueled creeper. We love "Elf,"
but there are a few things you won't be able to ignore next time you watch it.
At its heart, "Elf" is a classic fish-out-of-water comedy, but with
the added twist being that the fish — Buddy the Elf — doesn't fit in back in the water,
either. The movie's opening scenes show us some great physical comedy as
the six-foot-three Will Ferrell squeezes himself into elf-sized showers and beds.
But here's the thing. Why don't the elves just, you know, make him a bed? One of the
things that makes the movie feel heartwarming and Christmasy is that the other elves up
at Santa's workshop are generally pretty nice to Buddy. They even take time to reassure him
that he's got his own special talents when he starts to feel like he doesn't fit in,
and even if they get frustrated behind his back, it's clear that they care about him.
So why, in the 30 years that he's been there, haven't they made the slightest adjustment to
their housing situation so that he's not destroying his spine every night?
It's not like it would take them that long. Building things is literally all the elves do,
and a king-sized bed frame and mattress surely wouldn't take as much time to cobble together as,
say, building a PlayStation 5 from scratch. He's not even the only one there who needs human-sized
furniture, since Santa Claus also lives there and has been doing so for about 1500 years!
Even if the elves aren't the ones who made his furniture, just order another mattress and put it
on the floor. It's not great, but it's better than sleeping with all your limbs hanging off the bed.
The odd thing about Buddy the Elf is that he never seems to notice
that he's roughly three times taller than everyone he knows. Well, almost everyone.
The only exception is Santa Claus. Buddy's still taller than Santa, but not to the extent that it
is with the other elves. If anything, Buddy should probably assume that he's a Santa,
or at least some other kind of human. The only reason that Buddy thinks he's
an elf at all is that after accidentally kidnapping him when Buddy was an infant,
Santa pulls the very un-Santa-like move of keeping him and handing him off to the elves.
This, by the way, is not what you should do if you ever find a baby.
Buddy's naivete is at the core of the film, but there's a fine line between his earnest,
good-natured belief that a random diner really did perfect the world's best cup of coffee and
the kind of oblivious ignorance of just not being able to put simple clues together.
"You did it! Congratulations! World's Best Cup of Coffee! Great job everybody!"
You'd think that if you can figure out how to build 85
Etch-a-Sketches in a single day, you'd be a little bit better at putting things together.
"Past the sea of swirly, twirly gumdrops. And then I walked through the Lincoln Tunnel."
This is going to sound pretty nitpicky for a movie where we're willing to accept that Santa
Claus can fly around the world in a single night giving all the good children presents,
but the fact that Buddy walks from the North Pole to Manhattan is a little ridiculous.
There are a lot of reasons for that, primarily the fact that it's a straight shot of about 3,400
miles from Santa's workshop to Manhattan. Even if we're willing to accept that the iceberg he
floats off on takes him down to Canada, that still leaves him in Nunavut with 2,900 miles left to go.
We'll give you that his elf clothes are magical and able to keep him warm at the
North Pole and below, but still. No matter how hyped up he is on maple syrup and candy canes,
that's a long and potentially — or, let's be real here,
almost certainly — fatal journey for someone who's completely unprepared for it.
Now here's why this isn't as much of a nitpick as it seems like. The scene sticks out because
this is a movie with Santa in it. The guy has a magic flying sleigh that can cover 212,000,000
miles in a single night! Sure, he's a busy guy around the holidays, but are we really meant to
believe that Santa Claus can't take 0.4 seconds out of his day so that he doesn't have to deal
with a singing penguin finding a dead body in the Candy Cane Forest after the spring thaw?
"You like sugar, huh?"
"Is there sugar in syrup?"
"Yes."
"Then, yes!"
One of the biggest sources of comedy throughout "Elf" is Buddy's ridiculously
candy-centric diet. After all, he hails from a land of Christmas cheer
that was inspired by the Rankin-Bass stop-motion specials of the '60s,
so he grew up on a steady diet of candy canes and describes the North Pole's four food groups as,
"Candy, candy canes, candy corns, and syrup."
Of course, that means Buddy should be straight-up dead. You probably figured this out for yourself
in the days after Halloween when you were a kid, but a diet that consists entirely of
candy isn't just unhealthy, it's also a great way to get Type 2 Diabetes.
Sure, you could explain it away by saying that all the candy at the North Pole is suffused with
Christmas magic that makes it delicious and nutritious, but after he comes to New York,
Buddy keeps up his standard habits, drowning a plate of spaghetti with an entire bottle of
maple syrup and washing it down by slamming an entire two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola. In fact,
the few things we see him eat in the movie that aren't candy are a bottle of booze and a jar
full of cotton balls. Fun fact: in real life, those cotton balls were actually cotton candy.
If you need any evidence that wolfing down that much sugar was a bad idea, look no further than
Will Ferrell himself. In interviews about the film since its release, he's talked about how he lost
sleep while the movie was being filmed thanks to the constant sugar intake. Multiply that by
30 plus years worth of sugar-coated meals, and you've got health problems that go way beyond a
little insomnia and into the territory of having your heart explode while chugging maple syrup.
"Did you sleep okay last night?"
"Great! I got a full 40 minutes!"
Just five years away from "Iron Man," Jon Favreau was the man who directed
"Elf," and he even has a small part as the Hobbs family's friendly physician.
He also provides the voice of the North Pole's resident narwhal.
"Bye Buddy. Hope you find your dad."
And while we're talking about Favreau's doctor, we'd be remiss if we didn't cover
what might be the worst medical decision ever committed to film. After performing a
DNA test to confirm that, yes, Buddy is in fact Walter's biological son,
the doctor advises Walter to take Buddy home to meet his wife and son in hopes that he'll
eventually come to terms with his situation and "drop the whole elf thing and move on."
Obviously, that all works out for Buddy and the Hobbs family, but by any measure,
this is some truly terrible advice. Both Walter and the doctor are operating under
the assumption that Buddy is extremely delusional. Any medical professional
worth his stethoscope would most likely suggest that they get Buddy some immediate treatment,
psychiatric or otherwise, before his disconnect with reality leads to more violence.
That's right. More violence. The scene with the blood test happens directly after Walter
bails Buddy out of jail after he assaults a department store Santa at Gimbels. In other words,
the doctor is confronted with a delusional man with a very recent history of violence,
and his solution to this problem is "take him home to your wife and kid." Here's hoping the first
thing the Hobbs family does after the credits roll is get themselves a new general practitioner.
"Your father…well…he's on the naughty list."
"Noooo!"
The driving conflict of "Elf" is that Walter Hobbs, Buddy's long-lost human father, has
landed himself squarely on the naughty list. The reason? Well, in addition to just being a fairly
unpleasant person — and all those murders he did in "The Godfather" — Walter has been neglecting
his family and focusing too much on his work. This is the plot to plenty of Christmas movies
about learning how to love your family more effectively under the bootheel of consumerism,
but there's something different about Walter's story. He's genuinely terrible at his job.
Normally, the person in this kind of plot who's obsessing over their work is at least
successful in that arena, which makes it more effective when they have to choose what's
really important. Walter's got plenty of money — that apartment at Central Park West doesn't
come cheap — but as far as the work goes, he's hardly a success. His company's floundering,
and their downturn is a direct result of decisions that he made.
Or rather, due to decisions that he didn't make. Despite filling the role of the workaholic who
spends too much time at the office, Walter doesn't actually seem to care about anything that he's
doing at work, to the point of approving a proof of a book that was missing two pages.
Even the most inept employee would notice if he was initialing two gigantic blank pages,
so the simple fact is that Walter just doesn't care. That raises a pretty grim question,
though. If he's neglecting his family for work, but he's not actually doing any work,
is he just sitting there, taking as much time away from his wife and son as he
can so that he can stare off into space and contemplate oblivion? That is dark.
"I like it. I like it."
The major drama at the climax of the film centers around whether Santa's sleigh is going to be able
to fly without the engine that's been keeping it going all these years. See, without the engine,
the sleigh has to rely entirely on the magic of Christmas cheer to power it around the world,
and according to the Clausometer, there's just not enough Christmas spirit to do the job.
But that doesn't make sense. This is a world where Santa Claus is 100 percent, actually,
factually real, with a toy factory at the North Pole staffed by cheerful singing elves,
a talking snowman, and everything that goes along with him. He brings presents to the
good children all over the world, which means that there's no disillusionment or
disappointment from kids who didn't get what they wanted on Christmas morning.
We also know from the movie that getting a present does in fact
increase your Christmas spirit, as Michael, Walter's other son,
boosts the Clausometer a little bit when he gets the skateboard he's always wanted. So if
Santa and the elves have been doing their job — and as far as we know, they have — then there
should be more than enough Christmas spirit to go around just from that, let alone all
the general feel-good sentiments of peace on Earth, goodwill, hot chocolate, and so on.
One of the things that makes "Elf" such a favorite around the holidays is that it's
an almost relentlessly cheerful film without getting too sugary sweet — Buddy's spaghetti
notwithstanding. In fact, the closest it gets to anything you'd call "dark" would
be the depiction of the Santa-hating Central Park Rangers at the end. Oh, and that one part
where Buddy commits felony assault on an innocent man for the crime of dressing up as Santa Claus.
But even if Buddy's sudden temper is slightly out of character,
that all makes perfect sense in the context of the movie. What happens after, however,
seems like a stretch. Since the original Gimbels Santa is no longer available,
the toy department's manager has to fill in, and frankly, that's ridiculous.
If you've ever been to Macy's around Christmastime, then you already know
that these stores take their Santa setup very seriously. It's a lot more complicated
than just one dude sitting on a big chair, asking kids what they want for Christmas.
The Gimbels we see in the movie might not be as dedicated to it as Macy's,
of course. Historically, the real-life Gimbels was Macy's competitor until shutting down in 1987,
with their rivalry cementing itself into Christmas movie history as a plot point in
the original "Miracle on 34th Street." Still, the idea that a store that big wouldn't have at
least a couple of backup Santas is somehow more difficult to believe than the flying reindeer.
Buddy's romance with Jovie, a young woman working as an elf at Gimbels,
played in a star-making turn by Zooey Deschanel, ends up being pretty sweet,
but it has a rocky start. Most people don't wind up going on dates with strangers who
sneak up on them in the shower, no matter how nice they are about your singing afterwards.
Considering that "Elf" has a runtime of just over 90 minutes, it makes sense that things have to
move pretty fast to get everything wrapped up by the time the credits roll. Still, Jovie's
awfully quick to forgive Buddy for creeping up on her in the shower, especially since the next
two interactions she has with him involve him beating up the guy playing Santa Claus and then
telling her that his tongue swells up around her and asking if she wants to "go eat food."
"I feel really warm when I… am around you."
The fact that she goes out with him at all, let alone ends up in happy elfin
matrimony after it's all said and done, is, well ... it's a Christmas miracle.
The weirdest part of all of this might be one that Jovie would have no way of knowing,
but that we in the audience can peg as what might be the only lie Buddy tells
in the whole movie. When she asks if he was spying on her in the shower, he replies,
"I didn't know you were naked."
This seems plausible, given Buddy's naive nature. The thing is, he definitely knew she was in the
shower, and we actually see Buddy showering in an elf-sized tub earlier in the movie. Of course,
he did have his hat on at the time, so maybe elves are a rare class of never-nudes.
"Oh I'm sorry, I need you to be completely undressed."
"I am completely undressed."
There are any number of ways to tell a child that they are adopted, though perhaps no worse way than
for them to overhear it from two co-workers badmouthing their Etch-a-Sketch production
output. Buddy learns the hard way that he is not an elf, and while you might reasonably expect him
to come to that conclusion after a decade or two, it's also not unreasonable to expect Papa Elf and
Santa to have had that conversation directly, saving Buddy a bundle of unnecessary trauma.
Santa's judgment in regards to the whole Buddy situation becomes even more suspect
considering the fact that he's apparently had all the information needed to reunite
Buddy with his father for years. It would be one thing if Buddy were simply an anonymous
orphan who crawled into Santa's sack one year; in that case, it would make a
certain amount of sense for Santa to take the human baby in and raise it at the North Pole.
But Santa also knows the name of Buddy's mother, Susan Wells, the circumstances of her death,
the name of his still-living father, Walter Moss, Walter's job and the location of his office,
and the fact that Walter is on the Naughty List. He only reveals this information when his hand
is forced, as Buddy inadvertently discovers the truth. While it's hard to hate on Santa Claus,
all of this points to a serious lapse of judgment on the Big Guy's part.
The scene featuring
future "Game of Thrones" star Peter Dinklage as hotshot children's book author Miles Finch
is cringe-inducing, but purposely so. Walter has bribed Miles to come into the office and
help his clueless in-house writers with a new book pitch. He's hoping this pitch
will be the thing that gets Walter back in good with his boss and save his job.
But before Miles can get into his potential storyline, Buddy barges into the meeting and
mistakes the man for an elf. Miles takes offense at Buddy's sincere excitement to see a fellow elf
as a crack about his height, and while he tries to keep his cool, eventually Buddy's
"insults" become too much to bear; Miles runs across the boardroom table and drop-kicks him.
That all makes sense, even if — in illustrating Buddy's insensitivity — the film itself gets a
little insensitive. What doesn't make much sense is how no one else in the scene — not Walter, his
writers, or his secretary — does anything to break up the fight, as Miles chokes Buddy to the ground
and breaks every lighting fixture and piece of glassware in the room along the way. They all just
sit there, apparently frozen in shock, until the scene ends with Walter angrily disowning Buddy.
Every year, it seems that someone on the internet discovers and is newly horrified
by the scene in which Buddy, banished to the Greenway Press mailroom for irritating Walter,
makes friends with — and accidentally gets day drunk with — a worker played
by Mark Acheson. As they recline on a pair of rolling carts full of padded envelopes,
declaring themselves best friends, Mailroom Guy, as he is credited, laments the direction
that his life has taken; he just goes with the flow, but now he needs to get out of the flow.
"I'm 26 years old, I got nothing to show for it."
"You're young. You're so young."
Acheson was in fact 46 years old when the film was released, and while he may appear
relatively youthful for a 46-year-old, he makes for an alarmingly craggy, gravel-voiced
26-year-old. Mailroom Guy works in a chaotic processing room with no source of natural light,
he drinks from a half-pint of hard liquor on the job, and only has the job thanks to a
prison work-release program. So, the impact of the gag makes for a worthy suspension of disbelief.