Cottonheaded ninnymuggins

Family movie last week:  Elf.

Naturally.

It's not a great movie.

And it only barely meets my definition of a true Christmas story. It makes a respectful nod at the rebirth and redemption myth as the Scrooge-ish James Caan character learns the true meaning of Christmas, but it's the slightest of nods, two stories passing each other on opposite sides of the street greeting each other quickly and perfunctorily as they each hurry on their way to different ends.  "Hello, Christmas Carol."  "Hello, Elf."  "Merry Christmas, CC."  "Merry Christmas, Elf."  "So long, CC."  "So long, Elf."

A case could be made that Buddy the Elf is a Christ figure, the innocent who descends from a heaven and saves the souls and brings new life to the people he meets. Anyway, I'm sure I could make the case.  Back in high school I once wrote a paper proving that all of the characters in Fahrenheit 451, including the villains, were Christ figures. My English teacher was only mildly amused.

But the movie doesn't bear thinking about on either of those points, and if you do think about it, you'll find that it equates Christmas spirit with believing in Santa Claus and makes Santa all about kids getting all the cool stuff they ever wanted, and you'll get depressed and start thinking that maybe Bill O'Reilly has a point.

Nevermind.

It's a charming movie.  Maybe it's not great, but it is good.  Very good. Will Farrell is delightful as Buddy the Elf, and Zoey Deschanel makes my heart skip.  Sue me, I've got a thing for blondes with funny noses and big eyes. And I'm amazed that no record company's given her a contract yet.  I'm thinking of buying the soundtrack just for her duets with Farrell and Leon Redbone on "Baby, It's Cold Outside."

Bob Newhart's self-parody is almost as funny as the writers thought it would be. Mary Steenburgen is wasted, although she doesn't seem to mind.  And I was surprised that with the example of The Lord of the Rings to draw on the filmmakers still couldn't pull off the tricks of perspective that are supposed to make the actors playing real elves look elf-sized next to Buddy.

But James Caan underplays his part beautifully. Through a war between his sorrow-filled eyes and his dyspeptic frown he shows a man who is dismayed by his own ill-humor but who can't do anything about the conflict within him because he just has no time to waste on self-help. The whole idea that he shouldn't be so irritable and impatient makes him more irritable and impatient.

And director Jon Favreau keeps the schmaltz and whimsy to a minimum and avoids the temptation to "magic up" his story. In fact, he does what he can to make the story as much about about living in New York City as it is about living with an elf in New York City. Favreau also accepts the fact that some gags are funnier than others and he's content to earn chuckles, titters, and smiles along with the belly laughs. He also keeps in mind the most important rule of comedy, the rule that TV and most movie comedies violate with a perverse glee: Characters in comedies don't know they're being funny.

(If you haven't seen it yet, you should rent Favreau's wiseguy comedy, Made. It's a good film in its own right, but now it's also an interesting companion piece, about another pair of innocents trying to figure out New York.)

So I'm giving Favreau credit for the best thing about Elf, the quality that makes it more than just a good kids movie, more than sweet holiday fare, the quality that makes it a truly good movie.  More than it believes in Santa Claus the movie believes in the beauty of understatement and the joy of withholding information.

Favreau trusts that we've either seen enough movies or actually had lives so that we don't need everything laid out for us in big emotional scenes with the actors yelling and snuffling their way to fake catharses.

We know it without it ever being said that the little girl Buddy befriends in the doctor's office doesn't just have a case of the sniffles, she's very sick.  And we know that Deschanel's character Jovie has been terribly wounded in some way, but she's given no scene in which she tearfully tells us what happened...because it doesn't matter.  All that matters is that she's too hurt to care and that's why she's open to Buddy, whom otherwise she'd have dismissed as a kook.

And Mary Steenburgen has no big scene in which she "comes to terms" with the fact that her husband had a child by another woman. There isn't a scene in which James Caan reveals to her the truth about his past love. There's no need. These people have been married for at least 15 years and presumably they've talked to each other during that time. The fact that 30 years before, when he was in college, James Caan had a girlfriend wouldn't be news. So instead of the big scene we get a little one in which Steenburgen very pragmatically tells her husband that Buddy is his responsibility and she's willing to help him do what's right.

But my favorite bit of letting silence and our imagination do the job of a thousand screenwriters is in the way we're shown how much Caan's character, Walter, loved the girl who was Buddy's mother and how it is for her sake he can't make a real effort to chase Buddy away. Caan does it all with his eyes in three short scenes.  The first is when Walter hears Buddy say the name of his mother. The second is when Walter sneaks a peek at an old yearbook photo of himself and Buddy's mother in college. And the third is when he finds Buddy sleeping in a display window at Gimbels.

There's no dialogue. Caan doesn't say out loud, "He looks like his mother." He doesn't even take his hand out of his coat pocket as if to stroke Buddy's hair. But we know just from the way he stands there quietly and looks at Buddy that this is exactly how Walter used to watch Buddy's mother when she slept, and how he watches his other son now and how he watches his wife, even though those two probably don't know that he does this. But we know it and we know from that moment that Walter will be removed from Santa's naughty list by the end of the movie.

As if there were ever any doubt. A lesser movie would have tried to pretend there was some suspense to it.  Elf knows that we know what kind of movie it is and that we won't be surprised by the happy ending.

In that way, Elf is the perfect Christmas story. We know Santa's going to come to town. Most of the fun of Christmas is the waiting.

(Update:  The 8 year old has looked over this post and informed me that I'm a cottonheaded ninnymuggins.  Elf is so a great movie, he says, and he gives it four and a half stars.)

Comments

[Mike Coy]

You are such a cotton-headed ninnymuggin!

[Wanda]

I just want to add my own little bit of trivia to a movie that I have watched probably 20 times (I actually paid to see it 4 times while it was still in theaters...and I rarely go to the movies!). The college yearbook supposedly belonging to James Caan's Walter is, in actuality, the 1968 McMinn County High School's yearbook (in Athens, Tennessee). I should know...that was the year I graduated. All the names listed underneath the photos in the album have obviously been changed. And it took me only 11 years to realize this! I'm a little slow, but I get there eventually! lol