Bad Santa (2003)

Bad Santa arrives in 2003 with no corrective ambition at all, a Christmas film that despises Christmas, children, and the retail economy that packages them. Terry Zwigoff, who spent his earlier career documenting the strange and the marginal, brings a documentarian's flat gaze to a screenplay the Coen brothers incubated and Ficarra and Requa rendered suitably crass. Universal read the draft and declared it the foulest, most misogynistic thing they could imagine. Miramax, sensing a market, said yes.

The ensemble includes Tony Cox, Bernie Mac, and Lauren Tom, and their presence registers as ordinary casting, not as a statement. Willie T. Soke is a sex-addicted alcoholic who robs malls in a Santa suit, and the film asks us to find him funny, then, late and grudgingly, to find him worth saving. Women pass through as appetites and inconveniences. The body humor is aimed downward and outward, with the dwarfism material played for laughs and no corrective offered. Race is never the subject. Thurman's dimness is a comic device, not a portrait of a mind.

What keeps the enterprise from curdling into sermon is its refusal to instruct. There is no lesson about consumerism, no reckoning with capital, no plea on behalf of the environment or the marginalized. The redemption is small and grubby: a stolen stuffed elephant, a beating administered to skateboarders, a sensitivity counselor post handed down as a punchline. That the film ends with a letter from a hospital bed and a child kicking a bully in the crotch tells us everything about its moral arithmetic. Here is a comedy of appetite and low-grade grace, and it has no interest in improving anyone. Two decades of cultural instruction have not made it any less of a relic. It simply was never trying.