Bad Santa is really a sweet Christmas story, if you look past all the booze, R-rated profanity, various bodily fluids and outrageous dark humour.
Christmas is the time of cheer and joy, but not for Willie (Billy Bob Thornton), a depressed, lecherous alcoholic and an expert safe-breaker. It is however a profitable season for him and his partner in crime, a little person called Marcus (Tony Cox), the brains of the pair. Every year, the two take up seasonal employment as Santa Claus and his elf helper in a different shopping mall across the country. When holidays are nearly over and the big department store safe is bursting with cash, Willie and Marcus get away with enough loot to see them through the year.
Lately, Marcus is exasperated more than ever with his erratic partner, who seems to hit the bottom harder every year and jeopardises the whole operation. Willie rocks up to the Santa gig blind drunk, acts rude and dismissive to the kids who come to sit on Santa’s lap, shags store customers in change rooms, and even pisses himself on the job. His misdemeanors draw the attention of the anxious department store manager (John Ritter), but it’s the security chief (Bernie Mac) who spells real trouble for the duo.
Then there’s Thurman, a chubby, snot-covered kid who becomes fixated with Willie after visiting him at the store, and is completely impervious to Willie’s foul-mouthed insults. In a different Christmas movie, Thurman would be your typical adorable movie kid, but his intense neediness and arrested development make him quite weird. When Willie finds out that Thurman lives all by himself in a grand house with his senile grandmother, he is happy to exploit the situation and crash at Thurman’s place with his current paramour Sue (Lauren Graham), a bartender with a Santa fetish. But then he comes to feel genuine sympathy for the lonely, bullied kid. Could there be some crumbs of humanity still left in Willie’s twisted, alcohol-soaked soul?
Bad Santa is definitely not a Christmas movie for everyone, and probably could only have been made in that brief period when the older moral taboos were in decline and new taboos haven’t yet asserted themselves. If you can roll with its subversive spirit and dark, demented and absurd sense of humour, it’s a grossly funny ride. A comedy is successful if it can make me laugh out loud while watching it on my own at home, and the increasingly indecent antics on display here (against the backdrop of classy and wholesome Christmas tunes) did just that. Director Terry Zwigoff, also responsible for the quirky Ghost World, clearly has a feel for stories about bitter outcasts who find a way of turning a corner.
Among the many superb comedic performances, Billy Bob Thornton stands out for his uncompromising portrayal of a self-destructive misanthrope with a complete lack of filter. It’s a gloriously unhinged turn that skates close to the edge, then goes over it with a middle finger up in the air. Though in the end he’s moved to care about another person for once, Willie is hardly your exemplary father figure.
In the past few years, I’ve come to like some Christmas movies that I might have found too saccharine when I was younger. It’s also nice to have a movie like this as a spicy antidote to all the sugar, while still embodying the redemptive Christmas spirit in its own rude and crude way.
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