Noelle, Disney+ review: Anna Kendrick’s cutesy window into a Christmas before Covid

• Dir: Marc Lawrence; Cast: Anna Kendrick, Bill Hader, Shirley MacLaine, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Billy Eichner, Julie Hagerty. Cert PG, 100 mins

If the Disney comedy Noelle gives the impression of belonging to a pre-Covid era of redemptive Christmas cheer, that’s because it does. The film’s a year old – it came out in America last November, and only now reaches Britain, making it an automatic retreat into stress-busting comfort viewing.

It isn’t exactly cinema’s salvation, with a story that’s a near-shameless retread of Jon Favreau’s Elf, this time sticking Anna Kendrick in Will Ferrell’s pointy shoes. But it’s likeable stay-at-home fluff – the kind of thing you could stick on as mood music while you get the decorations out.

Kendrick seems so naturally elfin that it takes a beat before you realise she’s not playing one: instead she’s Noelle Kringle, Santa’s daughter. Five months after the old man’s death…

Hold on. Santa dies?

The film shrugs off his mortality as if four-year-olds won’t suddenly have a host of existential questions. But not to worry – Noelle is a tireless do-gooder and sunny soul, intent on making everyone’s Christmases proceed as planned. The problem is North Pole patriarchy. It’s not Noelle, but her feckless brother Nick (Bill Hader) who’s the anointed successor in the ho-ho-ho department. He’s just not feeling it.

Hader’s screen time is brief, but he’s great at embodying not a bad Santa so much as an oppressed one. His inability to tell naughty from nice exposes him, unlike Noelle, as a hopeless judge of character, bound to tarnish the brand. And while he’s meant to be magically fluent in all languages, he isn’t.

We won’t linger long on Lapland’s sets, computer-generated reindeer, or anything about the look, except to ask whether, one day, someone might be hired to shoot a studio comedy half-way elegantly, ever again, please. Most of this is randomly set in Phoenix, Arizona, where Nick is taking an extended break – overly so, in that Christmas looms and he’s still AWOL.

When she sleighs down to fetch him, Noelle is detained, and is taken to be simply an insane person with a weird Christmas fetish. Heaven knows what anyone makes of her nanny “Elf Polly”, played (for no very good reason) by screen legend Shirley MacLaine, whose isolated reaction shots strongly imply “giving the editors a range of options” and “which scene is this?”

Writer-director Marc Lawrence (Two Weeks Notice) cooks up a batch of sitcommy subplots for Noelle to stick her nose into, most prominently a friendship with a divorced private dick (a scruffily charismatic Kingsley Ben-Adir) whose tweenage son has “mixed feelings” about Chrimbo.

That’s a horror of a thing for Noelle to hear, and a prompt for Kendrick to do what she does best here: fix things up with a guileless innocence, never seeking thanks. Her sweetness in the part goes a long way to help Lawrence’s straightforward message about “the joy of giving” slip down.

You’ll have forgotten every last thing about Noelle by next Christmas, but that’s almost a plus side to its flimsy charm – those baubles won’t put themselves up.

Available on Disney+ from Friday