Elf Made Over $220 Million. It's Still One Joke in Yellow Tights

It's the first week of November, which means Elf is coming, the way the flu is coming. Jon Favreau's 2003 comedy, starring Will Ferrell as Buddy, a human raised by elves at the North Pole, cost about $33 million and made more than $220 million worldwide. It sits around 84 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, became a Broadway musical in 2010, and is now played at so many office parties that HR considers it a mandatory training.

Let's give it its due, because a fair hanging needs a trial. The first 40 minutes are as good as American comedy got that decade. Ferrell, six-foot-three in a green coat and yellow tights, sets out for New York to find his father, a children's book publisher played by James Caan, who is on the naughty list for reasons that become obvious the moment he opens his mouth. Bob Newhart narrates as Papa Elf with the calm of a man reading a grocery list at a hostage scene. Zooey Deschanel sings in a shower. Peter Dinklage turns up as a children's author named Miles Finch and steals the movie in about two minutes, then leaves it, which is a gift no one else in the cast is wise enough to give.

The trouble is that the whole movie is one joke: a large man behaves like a child, and everybody around him reacts. It's a very good joke. It is also the same joke at the mailroom, the same joke at the department store, the same joke at the dinner table and the same joke at the doctor's office, and by the fourth time you can hear it the way you hear a neighbor's car alarm, as a fact of life and not a surprise.

Then the plot shows up, and it's worse than the joke. Santa's sleigh, we learn, runs on Christmas spirit, measured by a gauge, and it's running low, so the climax hinges on the people of New York singing loudly enough in Central Park to get an old man airborne. It's the same energy policy as a Senate hearing. Meanwhile James Caan, who spends an hour as a man who'd fire his own mother for being late, turns into a loving father because the third act needs him to, and not because anyone in the picture changed his mind.

None of this is a crime. It's a nice movie that does one funny thing very well and then pretends to be about something. But people now speak of Elf the way their grandparents spoke of It's a Wonderful Life, and that movie had a man standing on a bridge thinking about the end; this one has a man eating spaghetti with syrup. That's a fine bit. It isn't a philosophy.

Watch it this year, by all means. You'll watch it anyway; the cable channels will see to that. Just stop when Buddy leaves the mailroom, and you'll have seen the movie the way it ought to be remembered. A joke told once is a gift; told for 97 minutes, it's a family tradition.