Typical to his pre-WWII frame of pop reference, Zwigoff said that in casting the put-upon adolescent for Bad Santa he wanted “Joe Cobb, the first fat kid from Our Gang.” Sweet-faced pudge Brett Kelly has the necessary girth for the tragically-named Thurman Merman, and, to boot, a Shirley Temple-thick head of curls that would scream “fag” to any bullying Junior High Schooler. Nature Company timber wolf tee-shirt and all, Kelly, no cloying cutie, looks the hard-to-love part of a kid who’d catch a regular beating, and it’s one of Bad Santa’s many nice touches that his tormentors aren’t standard-issue central casting “jocks,” but a gaggle of peroxided skateboard kids, punks in the uniform of accessorized rebellion pushing around a genuine freak. For his part, Billy Bob Thornton as the boldfaced titular punchline, doesn’t occupy as much as wallow in the role of down-and-out Willie; he beer-sweats excess, self-hate, and drawled deadpan nihilism (“It’s funny how things work out. It’s fucking hilarious.”), and the dirty fun of watching this gaunt St. Nick flail and cuss through a destructive binge of sodomy and pant-wetting is sustained by merit of one of the all-time great boozy performances. A core of real, palpable pain slips under the sordid joke of his rock-bottom existence; with his loose catfish mouth dripping a cigarette, he almost captures the desperate, haunted low-life air of Warren Oates.

Crediting Kelly as “The Kid” draws a deliberate (sarcastic?) parallel between the paternal-filial relationship developed by Thurman and Willie to that created by another cinematic misanthrope, Charlie Chaplin, with Jackie Coogan in The Kid. It stands to reason then, that critics of Zwigoff’s vision of life as a stand-off between losers and over-confident, thoughtless pack animals, usually fall in line with critic David Thompson’s challenge to the conceit of the Little Tramp: “It is a character based on the belief that there are ‘little people.’ Wheras art should insist that people are all the same size.” And compared to the well-adjusted works of brothers Weitz and Farrrelly’s, merging slap-your-buddy-on-the-back bodily excretion laffs and softie dude sentiment with varying degrees of success, Zwigoff’s comic vision is the unmistakably “sick” one, product of a unreformed malcontent. But there’s something genuinely unsettling about those who demand, like some snooty personal ad, that artists “come with no issues”; in fact Zwigoff is at his best and funniest with his introvert neurosis fully indulged. The film’s suggestion that outcasts can find solace in circling wagons together isn’t nearly so offensive a cop-out as the teary-eyed money shot of About Schmidt, but Bad Santa’s cheap wish fulfillment finale makes one hope that Zwigoff’s next project, a reunion with Eightball cartoonist and Ghost World co-writer Dan Clowes, will stay true to the spirit and title of one of Clowes’s best one-off strips: “I Hate You Deeply.”
—NICK PINKERTON