From Joseph Shelton
A reminder why Bad Santa is the greatest Christmas movie of modern times
It’s the holidays again, and that means the daily soundtrack of your life will be a never-ending loop of jolly Christmas music for weeks. If I hear Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” again, I’ll put a sprig of holly in my mouth and crawl into the oven. All I can say is: if there’s a war on Christmas, I think Christmas is winning.
Forgive me for assuming that some of you are like Scrooge who, at least before being bullied into cheerful conformity, prefers to “keep Christmas” in his own way. And, after rewatching some classic Christmas movies, I can see where he’s coming from. From the dangerously irresponsible affluence-porn of Home Alone (imagine Kevin McCallister trying to defend himself from the “wet bandits” in a one-room homesteader’s shack) to the malevolent cheerfulness of movies like all those holiday rom-coms (I’m looking at you, Love, Actually), these are largely films for lunatics.
Which is what makes the original Bad Santa so fantastic. Billy Bob Thornton’s Willy, a drunken mall Santa, is a Super-Scrooge: selfish, bitter and ferociously self-loathing — which makes his choice of profession so bitterly ironic. As a con artist who robs the malls who hire him, he has become a Christmas parasite. He is, in every way, a truly bad person.
Brett Kelly is his perfect foil as “The Kid,” a seemingly nameless boy who lives a surreal existence, residing in a McMansion with his Grandma and looking forward to Christmas with a zeal that borders on the maniacal. The titular bad Santa sees The Kid as an easy mark, while The Kid sees the man as, well, Santa, and by extension, the answer to all his fragile wishes.
The trick that Bad Santa pulls off so well is in rendering believable Willy’s slow transformation from a man who hates Christmas to a man who still hates Christmas but understands, through The Kid, how much it means to some. In other words, he very reluctantly comes to learn the “true meaning of Christmas,” the oldest trick in the sappy holiday pap playbook, but the film makes it feel genuinely earned. Because The Kid’s idiotic sweetness is catching, and like Will Ferrell’s Buddy the Elf, he doesn’t ever have to learn the meaning of Christmas, he broadcasts it without ceasing. He IS the meaning of Christmas made manifest.
Bad Santa is the best Christmas movie of the last quarter century because it lets you have your
bitter eggnog and drink it too:
it’s mean, it’s brash, and it tells the story of a very gross man,
but it gets you to give yourself over to it in the end, and makes you feel, you know, just a little Christmas-y.
Movie Lovers is Bozeman’s independent movie rental store
with hundreds of titles you won’t find on steaming services.
The store is located at 200 S 23rd Ave., in the University Square Shopping Center. •
