Traditional Christmas Movies: Bad Santa

It’s Christmas, which means three time loser Willie T. Stokes and his partner are reuniting once again for their annual holiday heist. Posing as a mall Santa and his elf helper, the pair rip-off malls on Christmas Eve. It’s a good gig. But each year, Willie falls apart more and more. Depressed and unable to control his alcoholism, his erratic behavior threatens the job, drawing the unwanted attention of the head of the mall’s security. But after finding love with a local bartender, and befriending a small boy, Willie begins to wonder if maybe there’s some hope for him after all.

Christmastime means Christmas films, and here are some of my favorites! No list of Traditional Christmas movies would be complete without Bad Santa, which is maybe the best Christmas movie ever made, and also the one that most clearly sees this fetid capitalism-driven false holiday, cobbled together out of the broken pieces of pagan iconography stolen by Christian Colonizers and repackaged for easy consumption by the screaming, open-mouthed masses of eager hoi polloi…

But I digress…

Bad Santa is an unreasonably funny film about based on an idea that you would honestly expect to be the lowest of low-hanging fruit… What if the Mall Santa was a drunken loser? But it’s centered around balls-out performances by the entire cast that are astounding, and not just for how good they are either, but for how fearless they are. Everyone is all in here, there’s no backing down. They revel in being completely believably terrible people, the kind of performances where the true glory comes from the cast being brave enough to be this awful in front of an audience. Billy Bob especially excels at being absolutely foul.

It’s a phenomenal thing to watch.

And also hilarious.

So, Willie and Marcus are thieves who have long worked together, using the same MO: Get hired on as Santa and Helper at a local Mall. Slog through the open sewer that is working retail during the holidays. Get into the store after closing Christmas Eve, and while Marcus loots, Willie cracks the safe. Then they slip away, and coast through the coming year on the gifts that Santa brought them.

Eleven months later, they do it all over again.

The hitch in their otherwise beautiful bit of get’along is that Willie is an out-of-control drunk. Depressed and hating himself, and unafraid to show this to the world, Willie is actively looking for a rock bottom to hit. Because of this, his antics this year have drawn the opportunistic eye of the Mall’s security chief, and he wants a cut of their take, or he’ll call the cops, or at the very least, he’ll stop protecting them from the Store Manager, who wants to fire them, but doesn’t want to seem like a bigot for firing a Black Little Person on Christmas.

“I've been to prison once. I've been married… twice. I was once drafted by Lyndon Johnson and had to live in shit-ass Mexico for two and a half years for no reason. I've had my eye socket punched in, a kidney taken out, and I got a bone-chip in my ankle that's never gonna heal. …I've seen some pretty shitty situations in my life, but nothing has ever sucked more ass than this.” — Willie T. Stokes, Mall Santa, Safecracker, Drunk

But then Willie becomes distracted when he meets Sue, a bartender with a Santa fetish. Then, there's the kid, a strangely disconnected child named Thurman Mermen, who befriends him because he’s Santa, even though he knows Santa isn’t real. In truth, Thurman is desperately lonely, because his mom lives in God's house now with Jesus and Mary and the ghost and the long eared donkey and the talking walnut, while his Dad is on an adventure, exploring the mountains in Federal Prison, leaving him with no one but his Grandmother, who is always either comatose or making sandwiches, and he’s really just hoping for a Christmas present from Santa this year, something that hasn’t happened in a few years. When Willie is forced to move in with Thurman and his grandmother to lie low, after he sees the Mall Security Head tossing his motel room, he and Sue and Thurman and grandma become a little found family.

“I beat the shit out of some kids today. But it was for a purpose. It made me feel good about myself… like I did something constructive with my life or something. I dunno, it was like I accomplished something.” — Willie T. Stokes, Mall Santa, Safecracker, Drunk

Finally, it’s Christmas Eve, the night of the big heist, and it is then, after he cracks an uncrackable safe, that Willie’s heart grows three sizes. Willie decides then that the kid is getting his Christmas present, even if his double-crossing partners are trying to kill him, even if a rabid horde of trigger-happy cops are too. Willie steals one of the cop cars and rides hell-bent-for-leather for the kid’s home, a stuffed purple elephant clutched in his fist. Here comes, Santa Claus, kid, here comes Santa Claus.

But the cops shoot him down on the kid’s front lawn.

Thus saving Christmas…

“Dear Kid, I hope that you got my present and that there wasn't too much blood on it, although there was blood on the present you gave me, which didn't keep me from enjoying it, so maybe the blood doesn't matter so much, I guess.” — Willie T. Stokes, Mall Santa, Safecracker, Drunk, Dad… or at least, a drunken uncle.

One of the reasons that Bad Santa is so good is, simply put… it’s a well-written and complete story. Another reason, is that Bad Santa is brave enough to be something that nearly every studio comedy with a wild premise isn’t… be true to itself. Bad Santa doesn’t chicken out on the wild premise that it promised the audience.

In fact, it embraces it.

Willie is a foul-mouthed, unkempt, drunken, probably pretty smelly, loser at the beginning of the movie, and the film sticks to that all the way through. It doesn’t dilute this fact as the story goes on. It leans into it. Is Willie redeemed? Are any of them? Sort of, I guess, but not really, and probably not for good either. And really, that’s not the point either. The point is… this shit is funny. The film knows this, so it makes no compromises and takes no prisoners. In a world where most of the studio comedies now lack both a complete story, and the spine needed to be actually funny, Bad Santa excels at both.

Merry fucking Christmas.