November 27-December 3, 2003

movies

Ho Ho Hack

Saint hic: Billy Bob Thornton as Bad Santa& #39;s bilious Claus.

Terry Zwigoff coughs up Bad Santa.

by Sam Adams

Second Movie Syndrome strikes hard in Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa. Inevitably, after directors meet their first success, they’re advised to strike while the iron is hot, and maybe give something more commercial a try, just so they don’t get boxed in. The result is that a labor of love that’s been worked on for years is almost inevitably followed by a slapdash sequel with more money and less inspiration behind it. Think George Washington vs. All the Real Girls, Memento vs. Insomnia. (Memento isn’t a debut, but might as well have been for all the people who saw Following.) I used to curse first films for getting my hopes up, but it makes more sense to scowl at directors who jump off a cliff with stars in their eyes, and the system that pushes them forward without pause for reflection.

After Ghost World (the documentarian's first foray into fiction), someone must have looked at Zwigoff and said, "Hey, I've got a story about losers -- and this is just the guy!" But where the earlier film showed the world from an outcast's point of view, Bad Santa encourages us to heap scorn on its benighted characters -- in other words, all of them. Billy Bob Thornton's Willie Soke, an alcoholic safecracker who robs department stores of their Christmas Eve takes by posing as a shopping-mall Santa, deserves every bit of abuse the world can heap on him, as does his accomplice, a foul-mouthed midget (Tony Cox) whose only redeeming characteristic is his disgust for his partner. But the movie doesn't stop there: Every character, large or small, is rendered as an oversize grotesque. With yellow teeth and venal lust oozing out his pores, Bernie Mac manages to find a zest for life in his corrupt security chief, and though John Ritter's inept store manager is mainly seen as a buffoon -- he can't find a way to fire Willie, despite the fact that he turns up to work drunk and yells obscenities at children -- his baffled niceness comes as a physical relief, like a cool rain washing bird shit off your windshield.

Bad Santa might have been a better, or at least less intolerable, movie if it had been made by a less talented director, one who would have played the movie's more appalling moments for gross-out comedy, rather than lavishing on them a realism that only makes them genuinely disgusting, and not humorously so. (Fake dog poop is funny. Real dog poop just stinks.) Making a second movie quickly is always considered a "smart" career move, and if Bad Santa does well at the box office, Zwigoff will get credit for being a savvy player. That Bad Santa is as vile and stupid as Ghost World was insightful and touching is something Hollywood has no interest in measuring.

Bad Santa

Directed by Terry Zwigoff A Miramax release Now playing at area theaters

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