by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

This year marks the second winter season that I’m leading tours of the Dyker Heights Christmas Lights. In a time when “joy is canceled,” it is certainly tougher and, at least to some extent, a political statement. (Sure, cancel ostentatious Christmas displays so we can focus on Gaza and the Congo and Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh and find a way to come together to stop all the misery and death. But if we cancel joy unto itself, what do we have left to live for?). But it’s still a pleasant experience: ninety minutes to two hours of chaperoning a crowd of mostly adult tourists through a few heavily-lit blocks in the neighborhood directly to my east. And every night I’ve done the tour, about three blocks in, there’s a house, otherwise unlit, with a solitary inner-lit inflatable of an ecstatic Will Ferrell as Buddy the Elf.

It’s kind of remarkable how well-beloved Elf (dir. Jon Favreau, 2003) is, to the point where I’m unsure if the love is just an illusion of my age (millennial with boomer parents) and location (New York where the film was shot). It’s a Christmas movie as much for children as it is for adults, a gentler though not entirely saccharine alternative to Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa released the same month. The film provides one of the few instances of the “manic pixie dream boy” trope with Buddy, made mostly of sugary substances and Christmas cheer. The Christmas spirit also works to handwave away any of the many plot holes (e.g. how Buddy gets money to buy anything, where he put his change of pajamas, and what junction he had to get on to go from the seven layers of the Candy Cane Forest to get to northern New Jersey). And while the film was my childhood introduction to Peter Dinklage (as primadonna children’s book author Miles Finch), I’m not sure he looks back on his scene, little-person jokes and all, with fondness. 

And yet, the film works and holds up two decades later. Ferrell’s hammy persona, both within and outside his roles, sometimes rubs me the wrong way, but here it works just right. Buddy makes me laugh when we’re supposed to laugh and cringe when we’re supposed to cringe. (And indeed, I’d place Elf in a sort of “cringe humor for kids” category, especially given its presence in the same era of the UK and US The Office productions.) One of the OG Manic Pixie Dream Girls, Zooey Deschanel, brings a welcome charm and some She-before-Him musical talent in one of her breakout roles. James Caan is almost perfectly cast (aside from the height difference between himself and Ferrell) as Buddy’s biological father Walter Hobbs, going from naughty-list jerk to a caring un-estranged father. (Sidenote: this was probably my introduction to Caan’s work, aside from perhaps the 1971 TV film Brian’s Song in one of my father’s efforts to pass down his favorites.) Similarly, Newhart fits the adopted-father role well, his “emotional constipation” (my spouse’s words) a high contrast to Buddy, who can show how he’s feeling pretty much as it happens.

Yet what I keep coming back to — even in the moments of the film where I think “do I even like this movie?” (which happens more than I wish were the case) — is the inherent New York-ness of the film. It’s a New York Christmas in the year of “A New York Christmas,”  a time in the city where everyone, even me at age 11, felt a deep wound. One that, twenty years later, hasn’t fully healed, as the latest civic wounds — existential hypergentrification, Covid — have opened up and have not yet closed. It’s a film starring a product of the Not Ready For Primetime Players, and while Ferrell’s southern California born-and-bred, there’s just a bit of that he-made-it-here provincialism in my embrace of his performance. It’s a movie that brings back Gimbel’s and has a joke about how many Ray’s Pizzas are around this town and how every one of them claims to be the original (“but the real one’s on 11th”). So even when the corniness or the cringiness gets to be too much, I can still come home to Elf. Because Elf came home to us. And if we can keep that home together — not just through impromptu caroling bumping up the Santameter but through actually making the city a large home and caring for one another — we won’t let joy get canceled.