Flak Magazine: Review of Bad Santa, 12.11.03

There are many things wrong with Bad Santa: It has more plot holes than plot fabric, several storylines and much of the continuity seem to have been abandoned in the editing room, and it's gratuitously gross and offensive in ways too numerous to list. It's also weirdly great, very funny and amazing for even existing. One can easily imagine a Bad Santa pitch meeting, with an executive rolling his eyes with each beat of the dark plot, finally asking, "And who, besides French intellectuals, will like this film?"

Probably the all-star lineup got the project done. The Coen brothers — with their critical cred, cult fanbase and O Brother bankability — produce. Billy Bob Thornton is the bad Santa, and Terry Zwigoff, with cachet from Crumb and Ghost World, directed. John Requa and Glen Ficarra, of Cats and Dogs fame, are credited as writers, although apparently the Coens and Zwigoff contributed there as well. The attachment of big domestic sitcom stars must have helped some studio suits sleep better during the production, their asses somewhat covered in case of catastrophe.

Still, you have to wonder about that pitch. Thornton and the dwarf Tony Cox annually tour the country as shopping mall Santa and Elf, only to crack the mall safe and take away the seasonal receipts at the proper moment. Thornton's Willie is a low-functional alcoholic ex-con, and Cox's Marcus is a pitiless, fast-talking psychopath who can turn his disadvantages into yours in one sentence flat. Willie wants to get out of the Santa/safecracking racket, but his lush's American dream — buying a bar on the beach in Miami — somehow never jells. Marcus sees no reason why the scam shouldn't go on indefinitely — unless Willie goes from low-function to no-function, as seems likely. The story kicks into gear as the pair set up the latest caper in Phoenix, at a mall with John Ritter as a store manager, Bernie Mac as a sleazy store detective and Lauren Graham as a booze-slinger at a TGI Friday's-ish bar. Everything seems set for the team to pull this off for the 10th year in a row, but, this being a Christmas movie of sorts, Willie discovers a forlorn child abandoned in a suburban house. Complications ensue.

Zwigoff gets fine performances. The protean Thornton is the polar opposite of the super-slick president he played in Love Actually, as he again shows his genius for the antihero. Without him, this film might well have been the train wreck of studio nightmares; it can't have read as funny as he makes it. Willie is the most appallingly unappealing drunk in screen history, but Thornton somehow keeps you watching, even as Santa stumbles, retching, into the alley. His incredible deadpan and precise timbre carry the gags perfectly. Nobody else could, with the same élan, explain the fake beard to a skeptical tot: "The real hair fell out because Santa loved a woman who wasn't clean." Improbably, Willie wins our sympathy. If he is loathsome, at least he loathes himself more than we do.

The late Ritter's small, deft performance is so good it grieves you. He is perfect as Bob Chipeska, the clueless, medium-well-intentioned mall manager who gets played by everyone. He's the kind of guy who can boot the regular Santa for a cheaper one, but is totally flummoxed by a straight-up grift. Seeing Ritter with Thornton again recalls his brilliant Vaughan, the gay hardware store manager in Sling Blade. It gives an "Aha!" moment, a flashback to an earlier flourish of talent, like the moment when Travolta gets up to dance in Pulp Fiction.

Bernie Mac doesn't have to stretch much, but still he's fine. He's much like his TV character — sly, worldly and gruff — only here he has all the warmth cut out. To his credit, Mac doesn't worry about his role's dirt sticking to him, or about being upstaged. He's mostly a straight man, but he goes with the gross-outs and lets Cox blow him right out of a key, hilarious scene.

Lauren Graham, the only reason to watch "Gilmore Girls," seems like she really relishes the break from her treacly TV persona. Sue, the bartender, is just the love interest, but Graham brings a wide-eyed electric presence to one of the gamest screen-nymphos in years. She's a sweet freak; it's not apparent what she would see in Willie, but she seems to surf life's surface so happily that the Santa suit might just be enough. Sue explains to Willie that Christmas was "forbidden" by her Jewish father, as if that explains her mania for it and him. It does provide a clue about Bad Santa's transgressive appeal and oddly cathartic effect. So much of it is just deliciously wrong.

In many places, Bad Santa is cartoonish — no surprise, given Zwigoff's direction. He broke out with a Sundance award for Crumb, a documentary about underground cartoonist R. Crumb. His first feature was Ghost World, adapted from a comic and also about a cartoonist, and its view was everywhere inflected by Crumb's. Thus Bad Santa isn't cartoonish in the Looney Tunes or Dr. Seuss sense; it's much more like Crumb's "Zap Comix," with perhaps a dash of David Rees' "Get Your War On." Crumb combines deadpan, virtuoso draftsmanship and hallucinatory storytelling in Grand Guignol hybrids of the banal and the taboo, both funny and disturbing. Rees' "Get Your War On" uses the most generic clip-art of generic yuppies in generic offices to voice sentiments commensurate with the obscenity of the Bush administration's "pre-emptions." Born in the smoke of Sept. 11, "GYWO" is polemically political, and therapeutically hilarious. Thornton's Santa has a good bit in common with Crumb's Mr. Natural (he's even given Crumb's obsession with "big and tall" women), and the elfin Cox's nihilistic psychobabble could be spouted verbatim by Rees' damaged yuppies.

It's doubtful that any of Bad Santa's many authors intended a blow against the empire, but its oblique subversion is unmistakable. The TV stars slum in the demimonde here (perhaps refreshing themselves by degrading their "images"). Down among the parasites and losers, we never see even a Bundy-esque nuclear family, and all the suburbanites who do wander through are like Chipeska: impotent, timid, conformist and clueless. If this were a conscious critique of the system, the losers would be more vital, noble and authentic than the bourgeoisie, but nothing like that happens, thank God. Still, it's hard to regard the film's literal pissing on Santa, the essential icon of reactionary infantilizing (goodies for the nice, nada for the naughty) as other than iconoclasm. It's just the sort of underground expression that bubbles up from the id — like rock 'n' roll, like graffiti, like hip-hop — when the dominant power inspires well-founded fear and loathing.

This film's not the savage satire some might want, but it will redeem at least 93 minutes of Christmas. As belief in Santa recedes in the rear view of experience, sentient adults increasingly come to associate Christmas music with the limbo of ransacked malls, closed airports, emergency rooms and worse. The soundtrack's carols exploit that ambient horror to wonderful effect. In Bad Santa's hangover, the lo-fi Christmas ditties may, for the first time in a long while, bring one to smile.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)