Christmas is a sham and if you disagree your upbringing was too comfortable. It's a holiday that took Jesus' birthday and trampled it in a stampede of Walmart shoppers. But getting presents is tight. Such is the struggle of the Yuletide, and such is the sentiment of Bad Santa, the realest Christmas movie of all time.
We all love Kevin McCallister's increasingly sadistic attacks on a pair of hapless crooks, Phil Hartman and Sinbad low-key kill it in Jingle All the Way and A Nightmare Before Christmas is great when you're stoned and 12, but no movie so perfectly captures the Americanization of Christmas and transcends the seasonal genre like Bad Santa.
A perfectly mixed cocktail of casting and dialogue, the Coen Brothers produced, Weinstein-backed comedy is better than just a Christmas movie. A modern retelling of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, minus Jim Carrey in greenface, Bad Santa is one of the best comedies of the last twenty years, watchable in any season.
The movie is set in a Phoenix, Arizona mall, waves of heat rising from familiar expanses of asphalt, surrounded by perfectly offensive suburbs, Apache Junction, and a perfectly generic addresses, Sage Terrace. The desert is not festive.
But it's the perfect place for Willie (Billy Bob Thornton) and Marcus (Tony Cox) to run their heist. Flanked by a brilliant cast including Gilmore Girl Lauren Graham, doe-eyed chubby kid Brett Kelly, John Ritter and Bernie Mac, both of whom died within the decade, Bad Santa is Ocean's Eleven in suburbia.
Bad Santa could be a stage play. There are no elaborate set pieces or action sequences. I wouldn't ever pay to see an actual play, but the sparring pairs of great actors and cringe-worthy dialogue is so good that if Bad Santa was, in fact, on Broadway, I'd certainly at least entertain the idea of buying a ticket. Even the minor roles are spot-on. Alex Borstein as an annoyed mother, Octavia Spencer as an over-worked prostitute and the perfectly cast mall skater bully keep the film's hyperbolic plot grounded in familiarity.
Fuck, Ritter and Mac are so good in their scenes together, I'd watch a My Dinner with Andre-style movie just about the two of them, the squeamish mall manager who cringes at the sound of copulation in the Big & Tall dressing room and the slick security boss, toes freshly lacquered at the mall's best spa. The brief interactions between Cox and Mac are just as hilarious as the first time they shared the screen as two tips of a love triangle in Friday.
As it turns out, an innocent, developmentally ambiguous kid is the perfect straight man to play off an emotionally destructive alcoholic.
And when Cox and Thornton share the screen the comedic timing is legendary. If not for their scheme which requires both their talents—Marcus' people handling and Willie's skills with cracking a safe—the two would rather not share each other's company. The animosity is clear, as Cox relishes his role as Willie's mirror, telling him exactly what type of shit he is, each of his rants followed by increasingly depraved boughts of drunkenness.
The lighthearted romance between Thornton and Lauren Graham, the bartender with a soft spot for Santa is on point as well. The relationship based on a shared interest in Old Grandad helps balance Willie out, keeping him from going full Leaving Las Vegas, planting seeds of actual humanness in his loathesome character
The weight of the movie, though, falls on the shoulders of Billy Bob and the kid, Willie and his adopted burden Thurman Merman. As it turns out, an innocent, developmentally ambiguous kid is the perfect straight man to play off an emotionally destructive alcoholic. Every scene the two share is a masterpiece of argument. If the vulgarity with which Willie talks to Thurman offends you, you've never experienced just how truly annoying talking to kids can be. Bad Santa should've earned the kid who played Thurman an Oscar. Of course, it didn't, but it did help him land a supporting role in Like Mike 2: Streetball, so I guess everything worked out.
Naturally, because this is a holiday film after all, at some point we see a bit of the Grinch's heart. Willie is not a complete monster. But it doesn't come out of nowhere. Each of Willie's outbursts are countered by bouts of regret familiar to anyone who's experienced crippling, socially alienating alcoholism.
Sentiment is unavoidable is late December, even amongst the Scroogiest of us. The brilliance of tragic heroes is their ability to make us root for them even when they do despicable things. It's why we wanted Walter White to succeed and why Willie eventually makes the moral choice for once in his fucking life. A movie about a drunk conman who berates an orphan would be no fun to anyone, save maybe Dick Cheney.
Bad Santa brings the inconsistencies of American Christmas to the surface: the blatant materialism, the fictionalization of Santa Claus and his elves, etc. It's shit we all know, shit we all shrug at in the name of holiday cheer. But the movie approached Christmas the same way one should approach their family gatherings over the next few weeks: with a bottle in hand and a honest joke in your back pocket. Merry Christmas, you fucks.
Angelo Spagnolo is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can follow him on Twitter here.
