director
Terry Zwigoff
screenwriters
John Requa
Glenn Ficarra
Arnie Marx
Terry Zwigoff
story by
Ethan Coen
Joel Coen
producers
Sarah Aubrey
John Cameron
Bob Weinstein
cinematographer
Jamie Anderson
editor
Robert Hoffman
cast
Billy Bob Thornton (Willie T. Stokes)
Tony Cox (Marcus)
Brett Kelly (The Kid)
Lauren Graham (Sue)
Lauren Tom (Lois)
Bernie Mac (Gin)
John Ritter (Bob Chipeska)
Ajay Naidu (Hindustani Troublemaker)
Matt Walsh (Herb)
Cloris Leachman (Grandma)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 91m
u.s.
release: 11/26/03
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other movies
by terry zwigoff
reviewed on this site:
- crumb
- ghost world
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Bad Santa is to Christmas what Bad
Lieutenant was to cops. I'll go out on a limb and rank
it right up there with Scrooged (only less stylish, and
without the incomparable Bill Murray, who was once considered
for this movie) in the admittedly small subgenre of anti-holiday
comedies. The film's success (or failure) really begins and ends
with Billy Bob Thornton, and if you don't get tired of watching
him sitting in a grubby Santa suit and growling "What the
fuck do you want?" to the latest kid unlucky enough
to park on his piss-stained lap (it never got old for me), this
is your movie this season. Merry Christmas.
Thornton is Willie T. Stokes,
a drunken, foulmouthed loser who wearily dons the Santa suit
each December for whatever shopping mall is desperate enough
to hire him. His partner, the diminutive Marcus (Tony Cox), is
a black elf with white pointy ears. Willie and Marcus have a
lucrative scam: along with Marcus' greedy wife Lois (Lauren Tom),
they break into their mall employer's safe after hours, make
off with thousands of dollars, and head south until it's time
to do it all over again.
This year, however, throws
Willie a chubby curveball, in the form of a neglected, pathetic
kid (Brett Kelly, likable without being cutesy) who adopts Willie
as a kind of surrogate Santa Dad. Willie will have none of this,
even when he's forced to move in with the kid and his decrepit
grandma (Cloris Leachman). Yet some shred of decency begins to
dawn in Willie's booze-soaked heart. Without losing his disreputable,
ornery edge -- he's still a drunk and a thief -- Thornton enacts
a slow, grudging turnaround that's believable precisely because
Willie is such an asshole. The movie is less about gaining the
Christmas spirit than about defying the corporate ethos (personified
by the mall's mealy-mouthed manager, smoothly played by John
Ritter in his final screen appearance) that hijacks and then
abandons that spirit every year.
This is likely the closest
that director Terry Zwigoff (of the brilliant documentary Crumb and 2001's quirky comedy-drama
Ghost World) will ever come
to a mainstream movie: Bad Santa opened on 2,005 screens,
for Christ's sake. Yet, like Thornton, Zwigoff doesn't sell out.
Peppering the soundtrack with liberal satirical appropriation
of dusty classical Christmas music, Zwigoff crafts the sort of
vulgar, deadpan-funny fable even Robert Crumb might chuckle at.
His taste in supporting actors remains first-rate: Bernie Mac
appears as the mall's corrupt head of security (who has a unique
approach to reprimanding a shoplifting kid); Lauren Graham, in
a far cry from her rather more innocent role on The Gilmore
Girls, scores as a bartender with (to Willie's bemused surprise)
a Santa fetish; Ajay Naidu (Office Space)
and Matt Walsh (Upright Citizens Brigade) turn up for
quick, memorable bits.
But it all comes back to Billy
Bob, who owns this movie the way Murray owned Scrooged
-- an unrepentant shitheel who finds himself, by the end, risking
death to deliver a pink stuffed elephant to the kid. Though not
officially credited, Joel and Ethan Coen reportedly devised the
film's original story (their names are on the movie as executive
producers), and I bet they got the idea while directing Thornton
as the stoic, humorless barber in The
Man Who Wasn't There. I have a mental image of them on
the set, putting a Santa hat on a sour-faced Billy Bob and laughing
as they realized there could be a movie in that.
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