2003 / 93 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

He doesn’t know when you’ve been sleeping. He doesn’t quite know when you’re awake. And he probably doesn’t give a shit if you’ve been bad or good. He drinks. He swears, sometimes directly at children. He robs the safes of shopping malls on Christmas Eve. I think it’s safe to say that this is not your ordinary Santa Claus.

As played by Billy Bob Thornton, Willie is probably the biggest loser I have ever seen in a movie. Most so-called losers in film have a drinking problem. The only problem Thornton’s character seems to have is that there isn’t enough booze in the world to slake his screaming alcoholism. We get a hint of what may have turned Willie into the heavily flawed, almost irredeemably nasty man that we see onscreen, but I doubt any trauma is enough of an excuse for this man’s behavior. He is a vile, disturbed and deeply flawed individual. It would take an entire team of psychiatrists working in shifts around the clock to begin to scratch the surface of fixing this man’s problems. The movie opens with him in a bar recounting, via narration, the various troubles that got him here. He doesn’t seem to care that’s he’s a loser. He knows it. He’s embraced it. And when he says something about straightening up and making something out of his life, of abandoning his wicked ways, it takes only a single glance into his eyes to know that it’s all bullshit and that he doesn’t even buy it himself. Nor does his partner, Marcus (Tony Cox), the black midget who accompanies him on every grift. Willie gets the Santa gig because he brings his own midget to the table. The midget also crawls into spaces that Willie can’t get to and tries, mostly in vain, to keep Willie on the straight and narrow. Or at least to keep him in check long enough so they don’t get fired before they can make their annual score. He calls Willie early on in the film, right when Willie has hit the bedrock at the very bottom of rock bottom, and the two of them move their act to Phoenix. Within a couple days, Willie meets a sweet woman with a Santa fetish (Lauren Graham) who is almost saintly in overlooking or ignoring his flaws. He also meets a disturbing and deluded child who latches onto him like a puppy latching onto a rawhide chew toy (Brett Kelly).

Like Uma Thurman’s character in “Kill Bill”, The Kid doesn’t even have a name. Yet there’s something unnerving about this kid that gets under not only our skin but Willie’s as well. When he sits on Willie’s lap, Willie wants him to get the hell off it immediately. The Kid barely talks. He knows, deep down, that Willie isn’t Santa, yet he calls him “Santa” constantly and acts like Willie is the real McCoy. Willie is an extremely lonely little boy. His father is in prison, though he has been told that his father is “climbing mountains” and he is being taken care of by a grandmother who is practically comatose (an underused Cloris Leachman). He has no friends. Bullies target the boy so often that he practically has a bull’s-eye on his back. He’s the sort of kid who looks set to grow up and strangle nurses, burying their bodies in the desert. If we saw Norman Bates as a child, then he’d probably look a lot like this. Willie moves in with The Kid initially seeking to rob his house. But he doesn’t. Soon, a tenuous thread connects Willie and The Kid’s lives. Each one comes to need the other to redeem themselves. Their own salvation seems to depend on the other. It’s a bizarre relationship, to say the least, but it makes an insane sort of sense in the confines of the movie.

Billy Bob Thornton has said that he thinks this movie is like an episode of “South Park” that turns into “It’s a Wonderful Life”, but I think that’s selling this dark film decidedly short. Neither “South Park” nor “It’s a Wonderful Life” has anything this disturbing yet hilarious going on. Billy Bob’s portrayal of Willie is almost too pathetic, and it’s that sense of larger than life human misery that provides the comedic framework for this film. As fractured and flat out fucked up as this film may be, it’s also easily the funniest damn movie I’ve seen all year. It’s also one of the ballsiest. It’s a Christmas movie in which the word “fuck” is used more than 140 times (according to the Internet Movie Database, I didn’t sit there counting). It’s sharp, surreal, blistering, gleefully vulgar, and hilarious. That makes it just the right movie to watch when you’ve been to the Mall and it seems that everyone else on Earth was there too. It’s like the “anti-Christmas” Christmas film. And yet, what I didn’t expect, was the amount of heart buried deep in its lump of coal soul. This movie doesn’t stoop to cheap sentiment, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t moments of quiet redemption and true emotion here. Billy Bob and Brett Kelly invest themselves whole-heartedly in their roles and earn every moment of sympathy and compassion they get from us. These are two great, naturalistic performances that really get under your skin. I also loved the work by Tony Cox, who plays the angry, black midget with gusto (the scene between him and Bernie Mac’s mall security guard is priceless). He takes a one-note sort of character and gives it enough angles to make it interesting. Lauren Graham fills her role with sweetness and Bernie Mac takes a great supporting turn and just runs with it. He’s so good in this that you can nearly forgive him for embarrassing himself in “Charlie’s Angels 2″. Nearly. And this film is a very interesting sendoff for John Ritter. He’s great as the manager of the mall where Billy Bob works, a man who desperately wants to fire Willie (and with very good reason) yet can’t quite get up the nerve to do so.

It’s not your average Christmas movie. Hell, it’s not your average movie. But it colors outside the lines and it doesn’t look down on its characters. It’s brimming with intelligence and oddness and even a hint of non-sugary sweetness. Plus, it’s the perfect film for when you’re so entirely sick of Christmas you could scream. There’s something oddly cathartic about seeing a man dressed as Santa swearing at kids and throwing an empty booze bottle at a parked car without seeming to care. So, Merry Christmas, everyone. Oh, and fuck off.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2003 at 10:58 am and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.