Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie''s plot.  
If the title of this review offends you, stop reading right now. Terry Zwigoff's "Bad Santa" is not for you. But if you have a soft spot in your funny bone for the darker aspects of human nature, if the caustic comedy of directors like Danny DeVito and the Woody Allen of "Deconstructing Harry" causes you to break out in uncontrollable guffaws, if you're as fed up as Charlie Brown with the commercialization of Christmas cheer and would like to see this cynical marketing of a simple holiday blown a wet, beery razzberry, then read on, boys and girls, because "Bad Santa" is the film you've been waiting for your whole life.  
 
Many critics praise an actor's bravery when they take on a role like that of Cuba Gooding's mentally challenged football booster in the recent syrup production machine "Radio". But a character like that is calculated to warm hearts and win Oscars; the risk factor is minimal unless you overplay and come off as a caricature. You want a risk? How about trying out a role like "Bad Santa"'s Willie T. Soke? Played by Billy Bob Thornton (in a role originally intended for Bill Murray), Willie is a boozy, foul-mouthed, degenerate nihilist with a soul as black as coal (which is more of a Christmas gift than he ever got from his abusive monster of a dad) who uses the Santa cover to case department stores which he then robs on Christmas Eve with his partner Marcus (Tony Cox), a little person who plays Santa's elf. All the while, Willie abuses the kids who come to see him, uses more four-letter words than the entire population of South Park, steals cars, carries on an affair with a waitress (Lauren Graham) with a fetish for Santa hats, nails overweight women in the big and tall dressing stalls, and drowns the fire of his self-hatred with enough booze to swamp the Titanic (he rides up the escalator to "Santa's Village" lying on his face, a broken bottle clutched in his jolly old fist). At one point, he wets his Santa pants right in front of the children, and this is actually one of his more forgivable offenses because he's so drunk he doesn't even realize what he's done. All the while, Willie spews invective at anyone who gets within his field of vision, cursing Christmas and family and the whole shebang. Playing a character like this is a REAL risk. If you play it badly, it's just an embarrassment. If you play it well, some people will not be able to separate the actor from the character and excoriate the performer as a monster just for doing his job to the best of his ability.  
 
It is to the endless credit of Thornton, an actor who has made a career out of socially maladjusted misfits ("Sling Blade", "A Simple Plan"), that he seems to have taken to this role without a moment's thought about what a monster like Willie could do to his public image. He growls the character's endless obscenities with a phlegm-throated relish, throws himself into twisted misbehavior with heedless abandon...and what's most amazing of all, somehow manages, against all our better instincts, to move us with this portrayal of a hateful man by never letting us forget that he hates himself most of all. "I am not Santa Claus", he tells a little boy. "If anything, I'm living proof that there isn't any Santa Claus." Willie is a man who has lost his capacity to believe in anything, most of all himself, and the wasted excess that is his life is no Dionysian revel, but rather the extended suicide of a man who feels that he has more than earned all his self-inflicted suffering (at one point, feeling that even he is being too easy on himself, Willie tries to take himself out with carbon monoxide in a garage...all while wearing the Santa suit, of course). This is a character which, if handled incorrectly, could have ruined Thornton's career. Lucky for him, and for us, that the actor sees the humanity in Willie and lays it bare, along with the baser indignities man is capable of inflicting upon himself and the world. This is a monumental comic performance, funny as hell and lived in down to the gin-soaked bones by a great actor, and the Oscar nominees are incomplete if they do not include him (which I have every reason to suspect they will not, as Gooding's Rain Man of the gridiron is much more the type of up-with-people role the Oscars tend to reward).  
 
For all its dark R-rated excesses, "Bad Santa" is ultimately, like many of the greatest Christmas movies, a story of redemption. Willie, in Phoenix with Marcus for their annual Christmas scam (they've been pulling their Santa heist for years, living high off the proceeds, but always financially dry as a bone come Thanksgiving), finds that the job will not come as easy as it has to him in the past. Their department store's sharp-tongued detective (Bernie Mac) and jittery manager (John Ritter in his final film role) are keeping a close eye on this suspiciously woozy Saint Nick. His shakes are getting so bad he can barely crack a safe anymore. What's more, he has somehow, against all odds, made a friend. His name is Thurman Merman (Brett Kelly), and he's a sad, overweight eight-year-old boy who latches on to Willie and won't let go. At first, Willie takes advantage of the situation, moving into Thurman's house, which the boy shares only with a deeply out-of-it grandmother (Cloris Leachman); his father is in prison for insider trading, his mother "is in heaven with God and the baby Jesus...and the talking walnut". But soon, Willie starts to realize that this sad sack of a kid, with his snot-crusted upper lip and Cupid-curls hair, who gets beaten up on a daily basis by skateboard punks and who exalts over an almost-all-C's report card, needs almost as much help as Willie himself. And Thurman, to his credit, does not believe that this bleary-eyed human trash heap is really Santa Claus. He just desperately needs to believe in something, or else one day he just might find himself in a Santa suit, throwing up in an alley, just like his new best friend.  
 
Thankfully, "Bad Santa" manages to tell this Yuletide story of a monster's salvation without resorting to the "Will Ferrell learns the true meaning of Christmas" cliches that have sent many a holiday audience into sugar shock over the years. Director Zwigoff's past films, including the remarkable documentary "Crumb" and the dark but surprisingly sweet "Ghost World", have evinced a soft spot for the disenfranchised and misunderstood souls of the world, and the miracle of those films is that he allows us to see and embrace the humanity of these creatures without soft-pedaling the weirdness and nihilism that has made them outsiders to begin with. Thurman's plight does make a dent in Willie's stone heart, but a dent is all it is; for all we know, he'll go right on boozing and cussing and banging fat chicks till his liver gives out and they carry him out in a pine box. Kelly, likewise, is not your typical cookie-cutter cute movie kid. Take "The Cat in the Hat"'s Spencer Breslin, add about seventy-five pounds, yellow-crusted underwear, ill-fitting shorts, and an intensely eyes-locked-on-you manner that is as creepy as it is amusing, and you can understand why this kid gets pounded on every day. But when Willie is dumbstruck by Thurman's simple sweet Christmas gift of a wooden pickle, when Thurman announces that Santa hasn't brought him a Christmas present for the last two years "because I know I'm just a dips--t loser"...you can't help but root for these guys. Maybe not to become president, but at least for Thurman to get the pink stuffed elephant he so dearly wants for Christmas. At least for Willie to find a reason to rise from the booze-and-puke puddle that is his life and see another dawn. That Zwigoff manages to move us with these characters, all the while causing us to laugh in disbelief at the extremity of Willie's awfulness and the film's lack of faith in the standard Hollywood-Christmas quick fix, is a great testament to both the director's delicate touch and to the skilled work of writers John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, who also scripted the darker-and-funnier-than-expected "Cats & Dogs" (the script went through several uncredited rewrites, including one by executive producers Joel and Ethan Coen and one by Zwigoff himself).  
 
Still, regardless of how unexpectedly touching the film may be, "Bad Santa" is still the blackest comedy in many a moon. I am personally tired of Hollywood pictures billing themselves at "outrageous", when really all that means is that they include a few gross jokes about bodily fluids ending up in somebody's Sprite. "Bad Santa" is the first comedy I've seen in a long time that is outrageous in the literal sense of the term; several critics have already excoriated it as mean-spirited beyond redemption, and a possibly-apocryphal internet news item had Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner (Disney owns Miramax subsidiary Dimension, which released this film) denouncing the picture as an insult to the memory of the company's founder. And the film is guilty of everything it's been accused of. It's foul-mouthed, it's sex-and-booze-drenched, it literally pees on the good feelings many of us have for the holiday season, it scores laughs off of midgets and elderly shut-ins and fat kids and drunks. But you know what? It gets those laughs. The audience I saw the film with laughed throughout the film, at several points so loudly that I missed lines of dialogue completely. Of course, there were people that got up and walked out, including the middle-aged couple sitting next to me. And to them I say, hey, different strokes. If you want a nicer Christmas movie, "Elf" is still playing across the hall.  
 
"Bad Santa" is a refreshing antidote to all those other holiday movies that wrap the season in prepackaged, mass-marketed "cheer". It's a brazen, daring, no-holds-barred comic assault on many of the values that we hold most dear, from the sanctity of family to the importance of good personal hygiene. And, amazingly enough, it still manages to carry a potent message about how no person is beyond salvation if he can find it within his pickled, diabolical soul to commit one act that is for the good of the world and others. "Bad Santa" reminds us of a message that is always useful to hear: no one, even the most loathsome of us all, is completely without value. It's the same message as "It's a Wonderful Life", albeit delivered with a lot more f-words and flying liquor bottles. And I suspect, among a small core of twisted, clever misfits, "Bad Santa" will join that Jimmy Stewart chestnut as a perennial holiday favorite. Best enjoyed, of course, with eggnog. HEAVILY fortified.  
 
