Welcome to installment #2 of the Screengrab's leisurely holiday stroll through some of the most beloved Christmas movies in holiday history: the 12 Days of Christmas marathon! You certainly don't have to do what I did, and watch all of these movies in a row over a period of two days, but if you do go that route, make sure you have a really comfortable chair and a lot of stuff to mix with your eggnog. For our second go-round, we decided to follow the path set for us by The Nightmare Before Christmas and move on to another movie with a somewhat jaundiced view of the season. But while The Nightmare Before Christmas was a harmless kid's toy, the equivalent of a scampish M-80 in the toilet of Christmas cinema, today's movie is substantially more dangerous and unpredictable, a grenade pitched into a urinal.
Released in 2003, Bad Santa was the second narrative film directed by Terry Zwigoff, and his first attempt at full-blown comedy. It's a movie that could easily have gone astray: the last thing the world needs is another picture about a cynical, world-weary rogue who cons his way through Christmas only to find redemption and learn to love again at the hands of a good woman and/or an adorably winning urchin. And to be sure, Bad Santa has those elements in spades, to the degree that plenty of people, already leery of Zwigoff's ability to handle broad humor as adeptly as he'd handled teen angst in his previous effort Ghost World were getting pretty nervous. Casting Billy Bob Thornton, who had already been tempted to the dark side of mediocre but high-paying blockbusters, didn't help much.
But audiences and critics who doubted what the combination fo Zwigoff and Thornton were capable of in this most subversive of holiday fairy tales were severely underestimating how far they were willing to go to fuck up the formula. Although there are tiny moments of redemption buried in the mountain of hiliarious sludge that make up the movie, they carry around them not a whiff of treacle, because of the degree of virulence the director and star apply to their extended middle finger to the genre. Willie T. Sokes isn't just some tired old wag who's seen one too many people being naughty on Christmas Eve; he's a genuinely loathesome old creep so impossibly degraded that even the kind of life-changing redemption that such movies save for their third act would manage only to transform him from irredeemable to merely disgusting.
And Bad Santa doesn't stop there in its ruthless determination to make hash out of one's expectations from this sort of thing. The adorably irascable sidekick is an African-American elf so breathtakingly foul-mouthed that he wouldn't be out of place in an episode of Deadwood, and he doesn't like the main character very much either. The love interest is a hopeless superfreak. And best of all, the adorable waifish child, in whose name the hero is expected to get his shit together and walk the narrow path towards salvation, is less an elfin Dondi clone than a borderline sociopath fat kid who inspires feelings of helpless creep-out. Like a lot of holiday movies, this one is about lost souls finding each other; but once they do, they don't know what the hell to do with each other, or even particularly like each other very much.
Bad Santa isn't a perfect movie. It oversells itself on occasion; it goes for one too many cheap gags; and it does, at its black and evil core, want us to walk away with a song in our hearts and the sun on our shoulders. But happily for those raised on a steady diet of the unpalatable saccharine of most holiday movies, it's still admirable and highly successful in its determination to ape the formal structure of those movies while yanking the rug out from under them at every turn. It's not the kind of thing you want to share with the whole family, but it's a hell of a funny movie, and after the stress of spending 14 hours with that one uncle who keeps telling the same story about when he worked at the dog food factory in Newbridge, it's the perfect palliative to too much holiday cheer. 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING:
An acrobatic 10 Lords a-Leaping. Despite its early placement in the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon, this is one you probably want to save for after darn on Christmas Day, when you and your special someone are cranked full of enhanced adult beverages and sick to the gills of all the fake-ass festivities.
Related Posts:
New Holiday Classics: Reindeer Games
The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas
