Bad Santa

In About a Boy, Will (Hugh Grant) torturously recounts having to hear his father’s hit Christmas tune earlier and earlier each year. Just as predictably, the Hollywood studios seem obsessed with bumping holiday-themed films up on their release schedule in a determined move to maximize profits. This year’s most recent example is Elf (released on 7 November), a cheery yet hollow film that harnesses the goofy talents of Will Ferrell but little else. In light of these developments, Bad Santa comes as a relief, an antidote to these sugarcoated, family-friendly films.

Terry Zwigoff, whose elegant brand of misanthropy gave us the documentary Crumb (1994) and Ghost World (2000) helms this feature, which envisions Santa as a booze-addled, womanizing con artist wonderfully played by Billy Bob Thornton. In the film’s opening scene, Santa (a.k.a. Willie) is shown in costume, lapping up drinks at a bar as he bluntly relates (in voiceover) precisely why he has come to loathe the holidays. As it turns out, Willie has taken the job of Santa at local department store not for his love of kids, but rather so he and his pal Marcus (Tony Cox), a dwarf who dresses as one of Santa’s helpers, can rip the store off on Christmas Eve. The money they earn that night is enough to sustain them for a year, at which time Marcus is inevitably forced to drag Willie out of whatever drunken, debt-ridden state he is in and reenlist him as a shopping mall Santa.

This year’s destination is a mall in Phoenix, Arizona, where Willie and Marcus find themselves under the watchful eye of the mall manager (John Ritter, in his final role) and security guard (Bernie Mac). Further complicating matters is the (quite literally) snot-nosed kid (Brett Kelly) who begins to follow Willie everywhere.

Throughout the film, the man sitting next to me kept shaking his head, saying, "This is wrong, this is so wrong," all the while laughing hysterically. In a way, this reaction sums up my (and the rest of the audience’s) take on the film. To say that the humor is dark is an understatement, and those expecting a lighthearted Christmas comedy in the vein of Elf should probably stay away.

Still, even as the film sets about eviscerating pretty much every convention one would come to expect from a holiday film, it stays true to genre’s almost inevitable redemptive ending. In some ways, this is my main problem with the film; the ending seems tacked-on, perfunctory. In a recent interview with The New York Times, even Zwigoff disclosed that a focus group had demanded a less redemptive ending. (When the interviewer expressed skepticism at this claim, Zwigoff clarified that it had been a New York focus group.)

In addition, the women in this film come across largely as caricatures, which is surprising given the richly drawn portraits of alienated teenage girls Zwigoff so ably rendered in Ghost World. Lauren Graham, whose quirky chattiness can be witnessed weekly on the WB’s Gilmore Girls, is reduced to a one-note character who conveniently steps in as a mother figure to both Willie and the Kid. Cloris Leachman is also wasted in the role of the Kid’s dotty grandmother.

Still, if you’re in the mood for something a little darker during the holidays, Bad Santa is easily one of the best films on offer.