***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Cox, Bernie Mac, Brett Kelly, Lauren Graham, Lauren Tom, and John Ritter
Directed by Terry Zwigoff & written by John Requa, Glenn Ficarra, Arnie Max, Terry Zwigoff, Joel Coen, and Ethan Coen
2003
93 min R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2003
“So what do you do when you’re not playing Santa Claus?”
“Nothing until March. Then I’m the Easter Bunny.”
“Bad Santa” is about being sick of the holiday season. Okay, that’s not what the story’s about and no one really talks about it, but that is the movie’s appeal: if you’re just flat tired of all the lights, obligations to relatives, cheerfully empty consumerism, and everything else, “Bad Santa” is a chance to jab all that in the ribs. It’s about a mall Santa who smokes, curses, insults children, steals from the store, hates Christmas, is too lazy to control his bladder, and has loud, weird sex with overweight women in dressing rooms. And he drinks. Boy how, does he drink. The superbly despicable Billy Bob Thornton, in a role he was born to play, should get some kind of award for being able to make so many jokes about alcoholism and still make every one of them funny. Oh, here it is, a Golden Globe Nomination for Best Actor in a Comedy.
A couple of things elevate “Bad Santa” from being a low-budget cheap joke that might come out in February and star Rob Schneider. First of all, it doesn’t star Rob Schneider. Second, Billy Bob and everyone else involved are not satisfied with “hah-hah, Santa’s drunk!” although there are many terrific sequences in the vein of Bad Santa riding unconscious up an escalator with a broken liquor bottle before massacring his paper maché reindeer. Billy Bob and the movie's many writers (yes, including the Coen brothers, although their names do not appear in the film's credits) have lovingly creating a full-blooded, three-dimensional mass of self-loathing. Without even knowing it, we’ve stopped laughing at Santa being drunk and we’re laughing at Billy Bob’s character being drunk. We’re no longer giggling about a two-dimensional caricature mocking a morally questionable cultural symbol, but an actual person who just happens to play a really crappy mall Santa.
Bad Santa doesn’t just shoplift or steal from the mall’s employee lounge. He and his diminutive partner (Tony Cox, a black dwarf who dresses up as an elf by putting on white pointy ears) rob the mall’s safe after hours every Christmas Eve. Then they move onto another mall next year. But this year, Bad Santa seems to be drunker and more surly than ever. Worse still, the mall’s floor manager (John Ritter) is suspicious and has brought his concerns to the mall’s chain smoking detective (a wonderful Bernie Mac). To make sure that no wholesome Christmas convention is left unmolested, Bad Santa is befriended by a lonely boy (Brett Kelly) who is, by some miracle, impervious to his many insults. The boy is either sweetly innocently or blissfully slow, and it is only in the last quarter of the movie that Bad Santa even bothers to learn his name. He is rotund of figure, pie of face, snotty of nose, and the victim of bullies, a problem to which Bad Santa finds an extremely satisfying solution.
As Billy Bob’s most frequent foil, Tony Cox is perpetually exasperated and always pulling Bad Santa’s chestnuts out of the open fire. He is mostly Billy Bob’s straight man, but he gets to blow up in a few scenes that have to be heard to be believed. Bernie Mac’s tough-as-nails, foul-mouthed detective, played mostly from behind an overflowing ash tray, is even more impressive because “The Bernie Mac Show” is, if not consistently funny, always jovial, infectiously good-natured, and family friendly. No one plays uptight and suggestive of an unspecified sexual aberration as well as the late John Ritter. The archetypal PC white liberal, he spends a lot of time hemming and hawing over whether to call Cox a dwarf, a midget, or a little guy. He is unable to quote Bad Santa’s dirty words aloud to Bernie Mac no matter how many of them the other man spews forth without a second thought. Bad Santa also picks up a really good looking floozy (Lauren Graham), who is attracted to him for no good reason, accept that we get a kick out of seeing him behaving badly.
Page two of "Bad Santa." Back to home.