Christmas films tend, like Christmas music, to be driven by sentiment. People watch the same films at the same time every year and then put them on the shelf for eleven months. And while the ones that are actually worth discussing include some kind of conflict (whether serious, like George Bailey's suicidal behavior in It's a Wonderful Life, or superfluous, like Ralphie Parker's desire for a BB gun in A Christmas Story), they tend to deeply glorify Christmas. It's a magical time of year that can cure depression or get you a toy!
This isn't to knock It's a Wonderful Life nor A Christmas Story, both of which are movies I enjoy well enough, but I do think it's fair to label these design flaws. These are films which do not speak to the reality of Christmas, and so points should be deducted. It's the obvious flaw in the Christmas movie credibility of Die Hard, the favorite Christmas movie of Extremely Hilarious Online Dudes everywhere. Even if you concede that it is indeed a Christmas movie, the holiday is essentially a background character to an action movie that could've taken place at any time.
Bad Santa is probably the most aggressively unconventional Christmas movie there is, certainly at least among mainstream feature films (it made $76.5 million in theaters following its 2003 release). The title isn't subtle--it's a movie about a "bad Santa", Billy Bob Thornton's Willie Soke, who annually plays a department store Santa Claus and who in addition to generally rude and drunken behavior, robs the store at which he works.
One of the most stark things about Bad Santa, nearly as much as its dark tone, is its setting--Phoenix. So much of Christmas movie mythology is built around snowy small towns, but that is not the world in which this film's characters live. They live in the desert. This is what Christmas is if you live in Phoenix--much like any political notions of "real America", this contrasts with the wider perception of Christmas, but this was a metro area with four and a half million people. Why shouldn't they count?
Additionally, Bad Santa includes very little of actual families. This was supposedly what made Home Alone a unique Christmas movie, but the existence of a family, even if a temporarily splintered one, defined the entire story. With Bad Santa, you have one childless married couple, a barely existent relationship between a senile grandmother and her grandson, and that's about it.
But the lack of strict family ties is what makes the relationships in Bad Santa genuinely touching. Willie is an obviously flawed creep/criminal, and the young boy, Thurman Merman, with whom he takes on a de facto father-son relationship, isn't a cute and precocious little scamp, but an awkward, overweight child who you can frankly believe gets bullied by the older kids. Sue, played by Lauren Graham, is the responsible adult of the film, proving far more adept at parental lessons than Willie, and she only enters the picture because of a sexual fetish for Santa Claus. It's twisted, but it works.
Bad Santa demystifies Santa in a way that is considered wildly taboo--every year, we develop a collective insanity in which even the most serious of people treat Santa as an actual person. Mail services receive and process letters from Santa. Meteorologists reference the presence of Santa's sleigh in the night skies on Christmas Eve. Santa is a character that 100% of adults acknowledge is not real, but to publicly say so is strictly forbidden. Earlier this month, a teacher (ostensibly a person trusted to inform children of the truth) was fired for telling children that Santa isn't real.
It has always been a mystery to me why religious people would teach their children about Santa. How does a parent lie about an essentially omnipresent entity who rewards and punishes for good and bad behavior, pull the rug out from under them and fess up to the fact that they lied as a means to manipulate behavior ("Christmas magic" is an absurdity--kids just want presents, man), and then go around and tell them "the people telling you about God, an omnipresent entity who rewards and punishes good and bad behavior...now they're telling the truth?" But I totally understand why nonreligious people, such as my parents, would lie about Santa. They didn't care if I became religious as an adult. They just wanted me to shut up.
And Thurman is the exact kind of boy who is susceptible to Santa--both of his parents are absent and his guardian is present in body only. So when Thurman encounters a decidedly unjolly Willie as Santa at the mall, it is totally believable that this kid believes that this man is magic. And there's something sad about it. If Bad Santa had a stance here, it was that someone should tell this poor kid to stop depending on Santa.
But this leads to my single-favorite scene in a Christmas movie. It is, in a movie which often veers into silly and dark territory, a poignant one which gives this movie so much more heart than most in the genre.
About three-fourths of the way through the movie, Thurman shows Willie his report card. His grades are mediocre, but Willie notes that they were better than the ones he received. Thurman then, in a continuation of his optimism, asks if this means that he will get a present from him for Christmas, as Santa had not brought him any presents in the previous two years. After Thurman sadly refers to himself as "a dipshit loser", Willie goes on a mini-tirade, asserting that he is not Santa Claus, and that the mere existence of somebody as lowly as him should disprove the possibility of a Santa Claus. But Thurman surprises Willie by replying, "I know there's no Santa. I just thought maybe you'd want to give me a present because we're friends." He then walks away.
And just like that, a movie marketed more on the shock value of Santa having sex in women's dressing rooms exhibited more heart than most other more "conventional" Christmas movies. By the next time we see Willie, a man who initially aspired only to exploit Thurman is trying to give Thurman the kind of Christmas you see in a typical Christmas movie. He doesn't exactly succeed, but he tries. And Bad Santa isn't a movie about being perfect--it's a movie about making the best of what you have.
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