BAD SANTA

Rating: 3

In BAD SANTA, a film produced by the Coen Brothers and based on their original story, we have a holiday story for our times. One that dares to show us without pulling any punches the nightmare that all this enforced good cheer has become, that exposes the seamy underbelly of what the season has devolved into and yet one that, paradoxically, celebrates what it ought to be. Sure, there’s gunplay, thievery, and general drunken disorderliness, but the important thing is that the season is made bright, relatively, and it’s accomplished, albeit unevenly, without even one of those annoying sugar plum fairies in sight.
Willie T. Soke (Billy Bob Thornton) is the eponymous Bad Santa, and bad doesn’t begin to cover it. He drinks, swears, smokes and wets himself and that’s when he’s on his best behavior with the kids who tell him what they want for Christmas. When not dashing the illusions of bright-eyed kids, he’s a safe cracker. He and his pal, Marcus (Tony Cox), a dwarf with big schemes and a material girl of a wife (Lauren Tom), have a holiday routine. Every year they stake out a new town, play Santa and his elf helper and then, on Christmas Eve, foil the security system of the department store they’re working for and clean it out of the money in the safe and of the carefully itemized list that Marcus’ wife makes for herself, checking it twice, no doubt. They lay low for a year, which for Willie means drinking the money away, and then start all over again in a new city with new names and the same scam.
This year is different, of course. This is the year that Willie and Marcus come to a Phoenix mall and learn valuable life lessons while also teaching a few to those who need it most. That would be the fat kid (Brett Kelly) who asks for a pink stuffed elephant and then sneezes chocolate ice cream all over Santa. That would also be Sue (a perky Lauren Graham), the bartender with the Santa fetish, and Gin Slagel (Bernie Mac), the mall’s security chief who knows how to get something on the side and who may or may not have Santa’s number.
At its best, BAD SANTA is gut-splittingly funny and without allowing Willie to break into a warm or fuzzy guy. Though he is given to almost insightfully reflective bouts of self-loathing, he still finds himself performing acts of a carnal nature in the dressing rooms of the big and tall department to the horror of the mall manager who hired him (a nicely supercilious John Ritter), and punching out the donkeys that make up the Christmas scene at Santa’s workshop before collapsing in a drunken stupor to the horror of a pack of kids and their parents. Despite this, he finds that the fat kid, the chocolate sneezer, has made him his hero and the center of a complex theology that also includes the Trinity and a talking walnut. The kid, obviously, has issues, but cynicism isn’t one of them. Willie, true to form, doesn’t so much warm up to this cockeyed optimist as tell him to kick the snot out of the kids who are picking on him, and then, lecture done, take Sue out to the Jacuzzi at the kid’s house to explore further carnal frontiers. Most of which is good for the kid, counterintuitive though it may be. Thornton throughout negotiates that tricky tightrope of being both obnoxious and yet somehow also not quite off-putting. He’s like the train wreck we know we shouldn’t slow down to watch, but can’t help ourselves from doing just that. Perpetually dressed in his aging Santa suit, he’s rude, crude, and almost too addled by booze and self-loathing to live, yet there is something intrinsically fascinating in seeing to which new circle of Hell all this will take him next.
Like Willie, BAD SANTA, too, never goes for the warm and fuzzy because it’s so much more fun to go for the jugular. It takes swipes at the fascism of political correctness and the circus that the birth of Jesus has become with equal vitriol while mining the sort of twisted humor that such transgressions deserve. No other film can give us presents that are quite literally blood-stained, human blood, that is, but that reek of both genuine sweetness and hemoglobin. It stumbles along the way, taking too long between swipes, but when it works, it is among the sharpest, funniest things that you will see this or any other season, and one that that will have you ho ho ho-ing all the way home.