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Don't let Mommy kiss Santa
He's making a list and drinking it twice, Billy Bob Thorton brings Bad Santa to town.
Apparently, seasonal depression isn't enough for some people. Director Terry Zwigoff and two-headed producer Joel and Ethan Coen embark upon this episode of low-brow grinchery, with the ambition of burning the traditional Christmas tree in a vodka-soaked blaze at the zenith of a 12-day bender-and then pissing on the flames.
But for some reason, (perhaps studio intervention) the end result isn't quite so shocking, but it is funny.
Serial department store Santa Willie T. Stokes (Billy Bob Thorton) is bad. The loveable trailer trash hero works a yearly scam knocking off department stores on Christmas Eve. In order to get the score, he must suffer the enslaught of snot-dripping tykes at a typical department store's "Meet Santa" set-up. After cracking the safe (the one trade he learned from his dead-beat father) Stokes and his bile-spitting dwarf partner in crime (Tony Cox) part ways until next year. Stokes takes his share to Florida, where he pukes and parties his way down to the last empty bottle.
However, after years of doing this, it seems that Willie is losing his touch. Apparently unable to control his libido, his bladder or his mouth, Santa does everything conceivable possible in order to get fired by his endlessly passive boss (John Ritter) or rouse the suspicioun of the store security chief - Bernie Mac, played way down from his role in "Charlie's Angels" and saddled with Cohen-esque character quirks (chainsmoking and citrus fetishism to name two).
It's this ugly clowning that should set the audience snickering, at least with the consistency of the average SNL sketch. We see Willie toss a pint of Grand Dad through the windshield of a parked car on his way to work, wet his pants on the job, spit salad and F-bombs into the face of a young brat at the food court and fornicate with a plus-sized patron in the big and tall dressing room. All of this is funny Jerry Springer/Cops/Homey the Clown adults-only humor. But as some critics have pointed out, at the core, Santa isn't such a bad guy.
Despite the excrement, booze and profanity that Zwigoff and the Cohens try to stick on the iconic Christmas figure, they can't hide a touch of Christmasy softness. Although the ending literally leaves the audience on the steps of a serious downer, the epilogue elevates things nicely like the typical "Christmas that almost wasn't, but then was."
And as long as you pick up on that - a few critics I've read have failed to see this - it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Frankly, I'm not interested in seeing Christmas totally bottom out, perhaps at the hands of Todd Solondz (Happiness, Storytelling), or Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia). Which is why "Bad Santa" hits about the right note for me. It's bitter enough for the grown-ups who still snicker at Jackass-style crudeness, but it's not quite the totally hopeless world of Solodtz (his motif: the world is s-, people are s- and there's s- that we can do about it). And it's not the emotionally exploitive raking over the coals of pre- "Punch Drunk Love" Anderson (his motif: sad people getting sadder and sadder and sadder, and you're locked in the theatre.) It's a comfortable if compromised (apparently Zwigoff fought over the ending) medium between the two, not short on degenerate humor, however not completely heartless.�
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