12 Movies of Christmas: Bad Santa
On the surface, Bad Santa might seem like the total opposite of the kind of wholesome entertainment that we traditionally associate with the holiday season. After all, this is a movie about an alcoholic, chain-smoking, potty-mouthed, sex-addicted, child-hating crook who only dons the white beard and red costume of a department store Kris Kringle so he can rip off the place. But who ever said that heavy boozing, a few hundred f-bombs, and “implied anal sex” (well, according to the IMDb Parent’s Guide) should cancel out a film’s ability to carry a pure message that aligns with the best hopes of the season?
Not me, that’s for sure, and I’m here to argue that Bad Santa delivers festive spirit better than any other modern Christmas movie I can think of – okay, with the possible exception of Elf.
Wille T. Soke (Billy Bob Thornton) is at rock bottom. Scarred by an abusive childhood, his life has been a continuous cycle of bad choices, self-loathing, and drinking himself into a stupor every night to forget his woes. But his problems are always there when he wakes up, and just about the only thing that prevents him from ending it all is the vague hope that one day he might kick the bottle and have enough money to open his own bar in Florida.
To this end, he travels to a different city each holiday season with his diminutive partner-in-crime, Marcus Skidmore (Tony Cox), working as a mall Santa and his assistant elf. Once they’ve cased the joint and the coffers are all full come Christmas Eve, Willie’s safe-cracking skills come to the fore and they make off with the loot.
With Willie’s alcoholism worsening, things take a turn when they arrive in Phoenix for their latest heist. Willie’s foul mouth and angry outbursts draw suspicion from the mall manager Bob Chipeska (John Ritter), who asks his surly security chief Gin Stagel (Bernie Mac) to keep an eye on them. Meanwhile, Willie also attracts the attention of Thurman Merman (Brett Kelly), a lonely and dim-witted kid who really seems to believe that Willie is Kris Kringle, and Sue (Lauren Graham), a bartender with a Santa fetish.
Under investigation by Gin, Willie moves in with Thurman and his senile Granny (Cloris Leachman) to lie low for a while. Gradually, Thurman’s innocence finds a way through to Willie’s shrivelled soul and offers him the prospect of something worth living for. But any potential happiness looks under threat when Gin rumbles the next robbery and blackmails Willie and Marcus into giving him half the proceeds. Willie reluctantly agrees, but Marcus and his greedy wife Lois (Lauren Tom) have no intention of splitting their share.
Bad Santa originated with the Coen Brothers, who hired John Requa and Glenn Ficara (Cats & Dogs) to flesh out a screenplay along the lines of Bad News Bears, the ‘70s Walter Matthau comedy about a boozy washed-up coach in charge of a Little League baseball team. Once they were done, the Coens added some more vulgarity and crass jokes of their own, although it still turned out less racist than its inspiration.
The Coens first offered the screenplay to Universal Pictures, who felt it was the “most foul, disgusting, misogynistic, anti-Christmas, anti-children” thing they could imagine. These factors were exactly why Bob Weinstein at Miramax couldn’t wait to get his big hairy hands on it, seeing it as an edgy piece of counter-programming that would contrast starkly with the usual family-friendly movies of the holiday season.
Terry Zwigoff was signed on to direct after his excellent adaptation of Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel Ghost World, and casting threw up some interesting names. Although the role of Willie was written with James Gandolfini in mind, the likes of Jack Nicholson, Nicolas Cage, Bill Murray and Sean Penn were all considered, with Robert De Niro reportedly attached at one point.
To play Marcus, many actors auditioned including screen veteran Mickey Rooney, who was then in his 80s. 3-feet-6-inches-tall Tony Cox was Zwigoff’s pick for the part, although the fact that the character wasn’t written as African-American was something of a sticking point – apparently the Coens “hated” him for the role. The producers also weren’t keen on the heavy-set Brett Kelly to play Thurman, picturing a more traditionally cute child actor. Zwigoff stuck to his guns and got both, much to the film’s benefit.
The casting of Bad Santa is one of its major strengths and Billy Bob Thornton nails the lead. He hasn’t done a decent movie in a long while and the obscene comedy came along towards the tail-end of his colourful hot streak when he suddenly vaulted from being a virtually unknown supporting actor to a left-field Hollywood superstar married to Angelina Jolie. During that period, he won an Oscar for Adapted Screenplay for Sling Blade along with receiving a Best Actor nod for playing the main character (he also directed), and notched a further Best Supporting Actor nomination for A Simple Plan.
Willie T. Soke may be Thornton’s finest film performance. When you get actors playing a thoroughly reprehensible character, can you sometimes sense them holding back and giving that little wink. It’s hard to pinpoint, but I’m talking about that brief moment when they seem to be saying to the audience: “Don’t worry, guys, I’m not really like this. I’m just acting, see?”
Thornton doesn’t wink, not once. He commits to the role with such reckless abandon, spewing his profanity-laced dialogue with what feels like genuine anger and disgust. By his own admission, Thornton drank on set some days and turned up to work hungover on others, which may have also contributed to the authenticity of his performance.
He’s terrific and his delivery is also spot-on. The script wasn’t changed after it was written for Gandolfini, so you’ve got New Jersey rhythms spoken with Thornton’s southern drawl. It gives the profane dialogue and unusual folksy musicality that I find so pleasing to the ear.
Thornton is the star of the show but Tony Cox deserves plenty of credit for playing the straight man of the double act. He gets some very funny lines too, but the movie wouldn’t work so well if Cox didn’t totally sell Marcus’s exasperation at Willie’s antics, just trying to hold things together until they can pull off the job.
The central duo get sterling comic support from some great performers who are sadly no longer with us. Ritter makes the milquetoast mall manager so hilariously ill-at-ease in his final screen performance, intimidated even further by Bernie Mac’s bizarrely strutting store detective, a mean-spirited bully who acts more like a Wild West bandit than an upstanding sheriff. And although she doesn’t have much to do, it’s a testament to the quality of the casting that you have an Oscar, BAFTA, and eight-time Emmy Award winner in Cloris Leachman playing a small part as Granny.
The heart of the movie lies in the relationship between Willie and Thurman, and again Zwigoff’s casting pick was spot-on. Watching Willie berate a more conventionally winsome Hollywood kid like, say, Haley Joel Osment at the time wouldn’t have been fun. It would’ve seemed like too much of a mismatch. But Brett Kelly uses his bulky frame and unnervingly blank stare to make Thurman a little weird and creepy, and we get a sense that even a hardened souse like Willie is a bit unsettled by him.
But Kelly also invests Thurman with a gullibility and off-kilter sweetness that makes it convincing that Thurman might still believe in Santa at his age. More importantly, his spaced-out otherness puts him in a unique position in the world of the film: He’s the only one who can actually see good in Willie, and that’s eventually what starts breaking through the defensive shell of self-loathing and gives the suicidal crook a little hope and self-respect. Not in a sappy Disneyfied sense (this is a Terry Zwigoff movie, after all), but at least a place where Willie, Thurman, Sue, and Granny can find a little comfort together as a gonzo surrogate family.
When the Coen Brothers commissioned the screenplay for Bad Santa they wanted redemption, but “not too much redemption too soon,” according to Requa. He and Ficarra delivered, and Zwigoff was the perfect choice for such unconventional material. The director is something of an eccentric himself. Before he got into filmmaking, Zwigoff was a guy who published underground comics in the ‘70s after befriending the famously misanthropic comic artist Roger Crumb.
His major breakthrough as a director was the acclaimed 1994 documentary Crumb, after which he made his first foray into fiction with Ghost World. With such credentials, Bad Santa was in safe hands - Zwigoff is in his element when dealing with alienated oddballs. For a film noted for extreme vulgarity, it’s a tastefully made picture, with clean and assured cinematography by Jamie Anderson and Zwigoff classing things up with Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Verdi among the familiar festive needle drops on the soundtrack.
Although the overall package is far more tasteful than the premise might at first suggest, the negative results of a test screening spooked Bob Weinstein into demanding some reshoots to soften Willie’s character. Zwigoff refused, so Weinstein drafted in Todd Phillips, then coming off the back of Old School, to film new scenes and take the edge off a little. I’m not usually a fan of interfering with a director’s original vision, but it was a good choice. Bad Santa is acerbic enough as it now stands and one of Phillips’s additions, namely the scene when Willie and Marcus try teaching Thurman how to fight, is also one of the funniest set pieces in the movie.
Perhaps surprising given its foul reputation, there wasn’t a huge amount of controversy around Bad Santa, although Billy Bob Thornton claimed he had to defend it against some more conservative Christian types by pointing out that Santa isn’t in the Bible. On the flip side, I’ve seen some people claim the film carries a sound Christian message: Willie is an incorrigible sinner (drinking, smoking, crime, sodomy, etc.) who finds salvation through an innocent Christ-like figure in Thurman Murman.
It works too from a pagan perspective, which is more my angle. Yuletide centers around the winter solstice, a time for reflection and modest celebration as the darkest day of the year passes and we look forward to the promise of spring.
Hope, charity, new beginnings and all that – if you can look beyond the outrageous swear count and all the raunchy stuff, Bad Santa is filled with festive spirit. As I’ve said elsewhere in this series, many of the best Christmas films are basically a spin on A Christmas Carol, and Willie T Soke is one of the finest Scrooge-like variants out there. Christmas is a time when we’re supposed to feel charitable towards others and look towards the future with renewed optimism, and Bad Santa enters into the spirit of the season by suggesting nobody is beyond hope and everyone deserves a shot at happiness. And that’s pretty f***ing Christmassy, if you ask me.
