Billy Bob Thornton is terrific as Willie T. Stokes, a washed-up, wise-cracking Department store Santa in Terry Zwigoff's outrageous black-comedic follow-up to his offbeat hit 'Ghost World'. Every year, Stokes takes a job as Santa in a different place in order to rob the store he's working in. Lewd, crude and very funny, and most definitely not for children!
A bilious, moral-majority-baiting comedy which sometimes seems like a movie equivalent of hair of the dog. Willie (Billy Bob Thornton) is an unshaven, self-loathing dr... more >
A bilious, moral-majority-baiting comedy which sometimes seems like a movie equivalent of hair of the dog. Willie (Billy Bob Thornton) is an unshaven, self-loathing drunk. Every year, he takes a menial job playing Santa in another shopping mall, allowing him to case the joint. Having claimed some of the perks of the job - being rude to small children, and screwing their moms in the changing rooms - Willie and his elf sidekick (Tony Cox) traditionally lock themselves in on Christmas Eve and make off with the cash.
This holiday season, though, is a somewhat different proposition: not just because Santa has reached the pits of suicidal despair, but since Willie has attracted the attentions of a portly, put-upon child, a relationship which keeps threatening to tip over into sentiment without ever quite doing so; its signature moment comes when Willie uses the contents of a whiskey bottle to sterilise a cut in the kid’s hand before taking a much larger swig for himself.
In Ghost World’s convenience stores, director Terry Zwigoff found literally rich territory for satire. Offered a slightly bigger budget, Zwigoff now gets shopping malls to play in. The resulting film feels as though the director had asked his old friend Robert Crumb to “enhance” a festive Norman Rockwell tableau. It’s a scabrous, scatological blast, crapping on conventional family values while offering its own moral relativism: better, in this instance, a Bad Santa than a godly President.
You’d think the compulsion to flick fag ash rather than false snow over everything would lead to a certain greying of vision, a monotonous misanthropy, but Zwigoff strings up performances like fairy lights. Cox is a busy, hectoring Sancho Panza; John Ritter a limp-wristed liberal whose political correctness keeps getting the better of him; and Lauren Graham a sweet, sexy barmaid with a St. Nick fetish.
The cameos, a Ghost World strength, are also telling, taking in Ajay Naidu as a character with the terrific credit “Hindustani troublemaker”, while never detracting from a career-defining platform for Thornton to itch, scratch and grouch his way through proceedings as the season’s most recognisably human American hero. < less
