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**** (out of ****) "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 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 unconscious while riding an escalator with a broken liquor bottle. When he gets to the top, he massacres his paper-mache reindeer. Billy Bob and the writers (among them the Coen Bros.) 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 surlier 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 with her. I can't emphasize enough how, despite its lurid premise, "Bad Santa" is actually a real movie, with fleshed-out characters and good production values, and not just something sloppy like "Dude Where's My Car?" or "Sorority Boys." Instead of the cheap and lazy direction characteristic of the aforementioned films, "Bad Santa" is directed by Terry Zwigoff, ("Ghost World," "Crumb") a caliber of director who elevates the movie from a simple flatulence comedy to a sublime flatulence epic. "Bad Santa" is also edited surprisingly well. After watching "Cold Mountain," "Gangs of New York," and all three "Lord of the Rings" flicks, five big budget epics that I enjoyed but found choppy, "Bad Santa's" relatively long takes and mostly invisible editing choices are refreshing. Characters like Bad Santa and Bernie Mac's store detective need to be looked at for long stretches at a time to be understood, and not cut to something else. I like that Christmas in "Bad Santa" is not entirely secular. The fat kid adores the Christmas story in his advent calendar, Marcus the Dwarf plows through a nativity scene without remorse, and every third profanity seems to have been replaced with the exclamation "Jesus Christ!" People are always saying that Hollywood is corrupting our culture, but I think, in 9 out of 10 cases, you take out what you bring in. If you expect to see a movie that makes you feel good about your atheism or, conversely, will allow you to puff up your chest in a morally self-righteous, Hollywood-is-a-sewer kind of way, you won't be disappointed. But I couldn't help feeling that "Bad Santa" seems to be emphasizing Jesus' humanity, which is what Christmas is all about anyway, by making him one of the boys, by letting him in on the joke. I would have found the movie drier, and possibly genuinely offensive, if there had been no Jesus at all, as if to imply that He is too marginal to include in a movie about Christmas. And Bad Santa is such a scumbag, who cares what he thinks about the Lord? That said, parents who take small children to this movie should be shot. And not just because it's clearly rated R and packed with obscenities, but because its appeal is so complicated. Small children may not be able to understand how grown-ups can love something and at the same time smack their lips with delight at the thought of this beloved thing getting ridiculed. I don't even understand it. I dig Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Christmas lights, presents, my relatives, and all that Christmas stuff. (I also recognize that the historical St. Nicolas, the fourth-century bishop upon whom Santa Claus is based, is probably spinning in his grave at the thought of having been divorced so much from religion that churches actually use him as the symbol of secular consumerism.) But there's always that danger of spending all of December in a pissed-off stupor, and we need salves like "Bad Santa" to ease the pain by letting us know we're not alone. The holidays can get under other people's skin, too. Finished December 30th, 2003 Copyright © 2003, 2010 by Peter Kovic (aka Friday + Saturday Night Movie Critic) BAD SANTA **** (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 |
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