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Played by: Billy Bob Thornton
Distinguishing features: Surly disposition; stubble; alcohol dependency; lack of moral restraint; alcohol-induced incontinence on occasion.
Sample quote: “You’re not gonna shit right for a week!”
What we’d get him for Christmas: A stint at the Priory.
If all Santas acted like Billy Bob Thornton’s department store deadbeat in Terry Zwigoff’s blackly comic cracker, Christmas would have been dead in the water a long time ago. An unrepentant petty thief and grade-A alcholic, Willie’s M.O. is simple: find a department store, become its Santa, rip the joint off. And if, along the way, he can have sex with a bartender who’s heavily into the whole Claus thing, get utterly blitzed and engage in unorthodox coitus with a fellow employee that will severely impair her ability to sit correctly, then all the better. But then he meets a kid who believes he’s the real thing, and slowly, Willie starts to change… Slightly. The joy of Thornton’s performance, apart from the sheer unabashed joy in his don’t-give-a-fuck exchanges with the kids sitting on Santa’s knee, is in detecting the slivers of humanity, as Willie comes to terms with the fact that he hates himself. The joy of the film comes in mining this for dark, dark yucks and in never taking the easy way out. Its idea of a happy, redemptive ending still involves a man in a santa suit being shot eight times by cop, after all.
10/10
