A film about the pain of living. Willie (Billy Bob Thornton) is at the end of the line. He’s in a cesspit and slowly sinking deeper. He tries to leave his drunken morally-vacant criminal life, tries to build something better for himself, but it’s not a life that Willie can live. Alcohol soothes the pain of living. Willie spends January through to November adrift on the beach drinking with abandon, but come December he works as a department store Santa, and when the employees leave for their Xmas vacation, he uses his access to the building to sneak in, crack the safe, and line his pockets for another year at the bottom of a bottle. Willie is possibly the most unsuited person to ever take the job of Santa, and not just because he’s Jewish, but because he’s a crude, crusty, nasty drunk who hates children. The distributors even proudly proclaimed at the screening that this film sets a record for the most ‘fuck’ words ever uttered in a Xmas movie. In addition to this, Willie abuses every male who enters his field of vision and wants to sodomize every female who enters his field of vision. As he so succinctly puts it, "I’m an eating shitting drinking fucking Santa", (I guess from a purely philosophical perspective this is true of any department store Santa, but Willie likes to emphasize the point). Enter Thurman Murman (Brett Kelly), tubby, silent, eight years old, and as much as outsider as Willie. He’s not too smart, but has a trusting innocence about him, and attaches himself to Willie and follows him around. It seems that life has already left Thurman behind. It soon becomes clear that people like Willie and Thurman are always, in a sense, bound to be losers. Destiny seems to have conspired against them. Willie was pushed around in his childhood as much as Thurman is now pushed around by older kids. But Willie learnt to survive, and he learnt to survive precisely because he learnt to see life as one big shithole in which you take your kicks where you can and to hell with the consequences.

In one of the many essayistic interludes that pepper Henry Fielding’s 1749 masterwork, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling he writes, "Our modern authors ... have fallen almost universally into ... error ... : their heroes generally are notorious rogues ... during the first four acts; but in the fifth ... become very worthy gentleman". And he notes, "There is, indeed, no other reason to be assigned for it, than because the play is drawing to a conclusion; as if it was no less natural in a rogue to repent in the last act of a play than in the last of his life." Fielding’s gripe perfectly describes the construction of Willie’s character. For most of its running time Bad Santa seems bent on subverting the ideological mechanisms that drive and define mainstream cinema, yet its narrative and character resolution is a pretty good manifestation of mainstream ideology. Thus, at the end of the film, Willie has a reformation of sorts when he selflessly sacrifices himself in order to benefit Thurman. And it is Willie’s reformation which shifts this film’s centre of gravity from one that focuses on the individualistic values of outsiders who define themselves in their own terms, to one that focuses on a species of Hollywood sentimentality that emphasizes the redemptive force of selflessly helping others. If director Terry Zwigoff begins by making a statement about what he sees as ‘the pain of living’, he finishes by transforming his "rogue" and capitulating to the normative morals and pleasurable dreams of the Hollywood Ending.