Terry Zwigoff
Babbo Bastardo (Bad Santa)

Christmas is approaching. In the Christian religion, it conventionally signifies the birth of Christ, while in other religions, especially pagan ones, this period indicates a time of rebirth, the lengthening of days, and the renewal of life itself, which, underground, develops beneath ice and snow to show its fruits in spring.

Without taking sides in sociological religious disputes that don't interest the reader too much, I think I can say that Christmas scientifically indicates a re-evolution in the course of things, and religiously (properly: Christianly), a re-evolution in the course of Man's life and every man's life. The rest is superstructure.

The film I am about to review well represents, under multiple profiles, the concept of revolution, although, like every revolution that presents itself every year (precisely the Christmas one), it presents continuity with the past, representing a possible future, but not entirely unknowable.

A cynical and derelict drunkard of the "former middle class" in America disguises himself as Santa Claus and, along with his dwarf friend—disguised as an elf—attends supermarket scenes for consumerist children. It is all an artifice to prepare future thefts (aggravated by fraud) against the shopping centers in question, to be consumed on Christmas night, when security services, employees, and patrons are engaged in entirely different matters.

However, the bad Santa (Bad Santa, indeed) meets, in one of his stops, a child so dull as to border on deficiency, who hosts him at his house, mistaking him for the real Santa Claus. The chubby and clumsy child is indeed abandoned by his parents (the father is in prison) and lives with his grandmother, who suffers from senile dementia.

From here emerges a vivid illustration of the relationship between a cynical swindler and a helpless child, described through contrasts between the man devoid of illusions and the young one who lives only on illusions and fantasies: one is ready only to pick the scraps of Christmas consumerism by stealing in the markets, the other respectful of small traditions and awaiting the fervent gifts of Christmas; one is violent, quarrelsome, drunk, sex-crazed, the other angelic, shy, and a victim of others' jokes. And so on. At the end of the film, after alternating adventures, betrayals, repentances, etc., one will find the lost father in the other, and the other the son never had. And perhaps, a tear will fall upon the tears of the viewer.

The revolution in this Christmas film is to be found mainly in the language of writers and scriptwriters (from a plot by the Coen brothers), as well as in the representation of Christmas festivities in warm and sticky Southern California.

We are far from the Dickensian subtleties and the oleography of so much tradition of Northern Central Europe, including Italy. Everything disorients the viewer, overwhelmed by foul language and distilled cynicism (splendid is the ideological and physical demolition of the advent calendar; equally notable is the hatred of Santa and the Elf toward children and their spoiling mothers), which makes this latest loser of the American genre cinema pleasant, in my opinion reminiscent, at least indirectly, of the protagonist of Böll's "Opinions of a Clown" (a book I recommend you gift for Christmas), in its fundamentally anarchic and nihilistic message.

However, I find it misleading to qualify the contents of this film as revolutionary, contrary to what the prevailing criticism and many other reviewers on the internet claim. In fact, in describing its story of "decadence-damnation-rebirth-purification," the film implicitly but rather conformistically represents the spirit of Christmas - both at a natural or sociological and a metaphysical and religious level - diluting, in essence, the cynicism of its form. Almost as if the director didn't want to draw all the consequences from the premises of the story, from the nature and woes of Bad Santa and the supposed Elf friend, taking the ideal side of the boy so naive as to appear incredibly daft, also forgetting the wrongs suffered by Bad Santa himself.

Perhaps oblivion is indeed the fuel for revolutions, probably also for Christmas: if, as the poet with the golden helmet noted, "one dies a little to be able to live," then to be reborn to a new life one must forget what has been—which is dead—rediscovering a bit of naivety. Therefore, wishing you to become naive again, freeing yourself from a certain past (not coincidentally from in-genuus: free), I dedicate this review to you as a Christmas gift.