Bad Santa (DVD)

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How old were you when you first realized or first discovered that there was no Santa Claus? Six? Eight? How old were you when you realized or discovered that not every Santa on every street corner and in every department store was as upright and squeaky clean as you would have liked to believe? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty-five?

"Bad Santa" gives us an outrageously distorted comic portrait of everything we ever feared about all those department store clones with the red suits, white beards, and hearty "ho-ho-ho's." In this 2003 farce, Billy Bob Thornton provides us with a Santa not even a mother could love. In the process of being as flagrantly grotesque as possible, the movie provides some wonderfully off-color laughs. And the unrated version reviewed here has about five minutes of additional profanity, sex, and questionable material in it, making it even more revoltingly funny. Proceed at your own risk.

Thornton's Santa is everything we've always dreaded and worse. He's a loser named Willie T. Soke, a grumpy, slovenly, depressed, twice-divorced, suicidal, profane, boozing, thieving, safecracking, immoral, womanizing ex-con. He is the Anti-Claus.

Willie supports himself eleven months of the year by working one month, December, as a department-store Santa. But there's a catch. He and his partner, the brains of the outfit, a little person named Marcus (Tony Cox), while pretending to be an ordinary Santa-and-elf team for a major mall store each Christmas season, conspire to rob the place of everything it's got. They're pretty successful at it, too, and by the time the movie opens they've carried out this scheme any number of times.

But this year is different. This year Willie meets "the kid." The kid is a fat, shy, curly-haired eight or nine-year old who unaccountably takes a liking to Willie after meeting him in the department store. The kid is wonderfully played by Brett Kelly in a totally straight, deadpan manner that's every bit the match for Willie's repulsively extroverted behavior. The meaner Willie is to the kid, the more the kid likes him. The kid (perhaps a reflection of Chaplin's "The Kid") is the eternal optimist.

Because the kid has no mother and a father in jail for embezzlement, he is living in an upscale house with his senile old granny, a situation Willie sees to his advantage by first stealing every dime he can find in the joint and then conniving to live there. Apparently, the kid has an enormous inferiority complex and an even more enormous need for a father figure in his life; thus, his attachment to Willie's Santa.

Of course, you can see where this material is going, but the surprising and delightful thing is that it seldom actually goes there. Not the way we figure it to, anyway. Every time we think the movie's going to get all mushy and sentimental on us, like having the kid soften up the grizzled old reprobate, the story takes a different turn and leads us to something wholly unexpected. Remember, this is decidedly not a "family" movie.

The picture is filled with sex, smut, nudity, violence, and grossness, and it never lets you forget it.

Although the movie's writing credits are attributed to Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, one of the disc's accompanying bonus items informs us that the story idea belongs to the movie's executive producers, Joel and Ethan Coen. Why the Coen brothers chose at the time to direct the anemic "Ladykillers" (2004) is anybody's guess, but they left their "Santa" tale in the capable hands of director Terry Zwigoff, who had earlier dealt with the eccentric cartoonist Robert Crumb in the movie "Crumb" (1994) and with some eccentric teens in "Ghost World" (2000). An eccentric Santa was a piece of cake for him.

Moreover, the picture is filled with an assortment of eccentric characters straight out of the Coen brothers' handbook. For instance, Willie will bed anything resembling a female--young, old, big, or tall--and as the story proceeds he meets another person besides the kid who becomes a devoted friend, in this case a sexy bartender named Sue (Lauren Graham), who enjoys making it with Santa's. Like the kid, Sue appears to like Willie all the more the meaner he is to her. And Willie really is mean to everyone. He's an equal-opportunity grouch.

Then there's Marcus's girlfriend, Lois (Lauren Tom), a cold-blooded, coldhearted accomplice in Willie and Marcus's machinations. And there's Gin (Bernie Mac), a crooked department store security chief who catches on to Willie and Marcus's plans and wants to cut himself in. And, best of all, there's Bob Chipeska (John Ritter), an ultraconservative store manager whom Willie describes as "pathetic," and he really is. He's a spineless milquetoast who senses something amiss in Willie and Marcus's behavior but is such a wimp he can't bring himself to do anything about it. This was Ritter's last film before his untimely death, and it was fitting that he went out on such a memorable character part. Ritter's facial gestures alone are priceless as he screws up his face just thinking about what Willie and a very large woman were doing in a dressing room of the store's "Big-and-Tall" department.