Bad Santa
Dir.: Terry Zwigoff
R, 93 min.
Opening Wednesday
The Cat in the Hat
Dir.: Bo Welch
PG, 78 min.
Now showing at area theaters
If Billy Bob Thornton were a concert pianist, he could play one note over and over with such range and modulation, you’d swear you’d heard a symphony. Thornton’s specialty is to burrow inside characters of limited emotional expression—the stone-faced barber of The Man Who Wasn’t There, the guarded gentle-giant of Sling Blade—and reveal unsuspected shades of feeling. In the scabrous Bad Santa, a vile and sidesplitting act of Yuletide vandalism, Thornton works infinite changes on the one-joke role of a surly shopping-mall Santa, turning abject self-loathing into a comic tour de force.
Bad Santa stars Thornton as Willie Soke, a broke-dick boozehound whose only skill is cracking safes. With his dwarf mastermind Marcus (Tony Cox, whose line readings pop like bombs), he’s hit upon a foolproof annual scheme: hiring on as a department-store Santa with Marcus as his elf, then looting the joint after hours. But drunk Willie’s hands get shakier every year, and his tolerance for adorable tykes is somewhere below zero. Then a pudgy, bullied, lonely kid (Brent Kelly) starts hanging around the mall. This is the point, thanks to a century of syrupy-sweet holiday movies, when we expect Willie to sober up, the kid to get a surrogate dad and Christmas cheer to work its magic.
Screw that. The beauty of Bad Santa, scripted with kill-the-reindeer ferocity by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, is its demolition of the lamest and most sanctimonious tropes of the Christmas “season”—the euphemism for that ever-expanding selling zone starting sometime after Easter. The movie looses its venom on candy-filled Advent calendars, on politically correct holidays, on grim Sun Belt strip malls strung with tacky decorations, on tots reciting their wish lists like panicky motorists ordering Big Macs. And make no mistake: The movie is filthy in word and deed. Even the title appears over a shot of Santa puking in an alley.
Even so, its filth is directed at the right things—even the entitlement of little kids, who tend to receive the foulest of Thornton’s epithets. (W.C. Fields would have winced.) The director, Terry Zwigoff, made the fine Dan Clowes adaptation Ghost World, and the two movies have a grubby consistence that fits Zwigoff’s ornery vision of strip-mall America as consumerist hell. They could be different issues of the same underground comic. Zwigoff uses the movie’s vulgarity like a weapon against the fake sentiment and consumption that make people dread the holidays. The laughter at my screening was truly explosive, as if the movie had said out loud what people were ashamed of thinking.
Much credit goes to the priceless ensemble, from Bernie Mac’s acetylene-torch slow burn as a house dick, to the late John Ritter’s spot-on portrayal of PC paralysis. As Willie’s innocently kinky love interest, who coincidentally has a fetish for Santa suits, Gilmore Girls’ Lauren Graham supplies the movie’s few notes of psychic health and sweetness, and is radiantly sexy doing so. But Thornton, in the midst of a career watershed, walks off with the movie in the crotch of his stained red pants. Just when you think he’s exhausted every expression of comic degradation, every leer or scowl or snarl, Thornton glares from under his smushed hat and registers some all-new shade of agony. Bad Santa is so hostile toward Christmas cheer that, perversely, it makes the holiday shine brighter than ever. It’s the anti-Elf.
By contrast, the au courant pee-and-poo jokes and bizarre innuendos strewn about The Cat in the Hat seem more offensive than any of Bad Santa’s four-, 10- and 12-letter outrages. An acid-trip visualization of the Dr. Seuss classic, the movie’s been padded to feature length by turning Mike Myers loose to do the kind of channel-surfing shtick that Robin Williams did as Aladdin’s genie. As The Cat, affecting a laugh that sounds like the Cowardly Lion on crystal meth, Myers imitates cooking shows, music videos, even his own “Coffee Talk” act from Saturday Night Live. But there’s no context for his pop-culture riffing in the movie’s retro Seussworld. He basically functions as a TV set, and he leaves the supposedly wonder-struck kids (Dakota Fanning and Spencer Breslin) pliant and glassy-eyed.
The movie isn’t the affront to humanity you’d expect from its scathing reviews—its psychedelic strangeness proves fascinating, in a deeply disturbing way—but it isn’t much fun. The director, Bo Welch, did the impressive production designs for many of Tim Burton’s movies, and Cat in the Hat has an eye-popping, overbearing pastel-horror look seemingly inspired by Edward Scissorhands’ soulless suburbs. Bad Santa has a similarly sour view of suburbia, but it’s attacking actual mall-zone blight. Cat in the Hat’s candy-colored ’burbs appear to have sprung from some hipster’s unresolved teenage misanthropy. The mom (Kelly Preston) is now a plastic Kewpie doll with her face on her car, and she’s been given a smarmy boyfriend (Alec Baldwin, giving the movie’s funniest performance) who wants to send the kids to military school. This Cat in the Hat resembles nothing so much as Dr. Seuss’ American Beauty.
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