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Recognizing that a character as thoroughly loathsome as Willie cannot be allowed to go unchecked, Bad Santa introduces not one but two stock characters to redeem him: The Dame and The Kid. (The latter is actually credited as “The Kid,” though we see from his C-riddled report card that his unfortunate real name is Thurman Merman.) But true to the film’s malevolent spirit, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s script (polished by the Coen brothers and Zwigoff) doesn’t play either one straight. The Dame, played by Lauren Graham, is a sexy bartender with a raging Santa fetish, and The Kid, played by Brett Kelly, is a plump, snot-nosed, dim-witted misfit who’s so pitiable that even Willie can’t bring himself to bully him for too long. The irony of both characters is they’re so enamored of Santa Claus—for two very different reasons, mind—that they’re incapable of seeing the slightly flawed man behind the dirty, gin-soaked beard. The harder Willie tries to push away, the more they dig in: The bartender, raised Jewish, is increasingly turned on by her “forbidden” fantasy as it becomes more forbidden, and The Kid stands in for all the children who will accept any crazy justification for Santa’s existence in order to keep on believing.

At times, Zwigoff overplays his hand: Packing the soundtrack with Christmas standards like “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Let It Snow” slathers on more irony than the film needs, and the deadpan touches are more effective than the pummeling outbursts of profanity. The best moments in Bad Santa are the ones that are more than just in-your-face provocative: Willie leering at the bikini-clad women playing volleyball on the beach, not even trying to make it seem surreptitious; Willie putting in a half-assed effort to patch up The Kid’s ravaged Advent calendar by replacing a chocolate with a single piece of candy corn (“They can’t all be winners, can they?”); Marcus’ quiet advisement that Santa “probably shouldn’t be digging into [his] ass” in full view of the children and their parents. But above all, I cherish this scene, where Marcus attempts to negotiate with a security guard (Bernie Mac) who blackmails them for a piece of the action:

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For a supposed one-joke comedy—you know, Santa, being bad and all—Bad Santa has more dimensions to it than many assume or acknowledge. Yes, there’s only one way to interpret Willie blasting a mother and his little boy for interrupting his lunch break—Santa, bad—but the film taps into the broader feeling in the culture that Christmas isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. Where some little boys get everything they want under the tree, for example, others, like The Kid, are stuck at home with a demented grandmother, with some surly bastard telling them that fried bologna on white bread with a dollop of salsa is a “tostada.” For The Kid, a blood-spattered pink elephant is the closest he’s going to get to a Christmas miracle. For even the luckiest among us, Bad Santa is a sweet, cathartic reminder that sometimes the season is neither holly nor jolly.

Next two weeks: Christmas and New Years, no columns
January 7: Bottle Rocket
January 14: Zero Effect
January 21: Requiem For A Dream