Bad Santa and The Triplets of Bellville
But at his best playing loners without illusions. In films as diverse as A Simple Plan, Pushing Tin, The Man Who Wasn't There, Bandits and the current Bad Santa, he inhabits characters who are lost inside their desires and drives, and closed off from the world. Bruce Willis, George Clooney and Kevin Costner do acceptable impressions of hard men, but they're post-Robert Redford-studly and "sensitive." They all hold a bit of sympathy in reserve, like a fire extinguisher placed in a wall box in case of emergency. Not Thornton. Whenever one of his characters does something decent, I'm always surprised.
The new Thornton vehicle Bad Santa isn't a great comedy, but it's profanely amusing, and it contains one of Thornton's best performances. The actor is so good throughout that he suggests psychological depths only hinted at in Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's gleefully punkish but repetitive screenplay. Thornton stars as Willie T. Soke, an alcoholic, womanizing crook who poses as a department-store Santa to jack safes with his best friend, a midget named Marcus (Tony Cox) who partners up with him as an elf. As directed by Terry Zwigoff (Crumb, Ghost World), who seems hell-bent on giving Todd Solondz and Neil LaBute competition for the title of America's most misanthropic filmmaker, Bad Santa is a one-joke concept, and a 13-year-old's joke at that.
Remember Shakes the Clown? This is the same movie, but with a heist thriller structure and a Christmasy production design. Zwigoff and company ask us to guffaw at the very idea of a department-store Santa cursing, stealing, drinking, wetting himself and scamming room and board from a credulous suburban child (Brett Kelly) who thinks Willie really is Saint Nick. Willie and Marcus are dogged by two foils: milquetoast mall manager Bop Chipeska (well-played by John Ritter in his final movie performance, especially in the scene where he stumbles upon Willie having rear-entry sex in the plus-sized ladies' dressing room) and the mall's chief of security, Gin (Bernie Mac). "There's something about the guy that makes me uneasy," Bob confesses to Gin. "Well, yeah," Gin replies, "Santa fuckin' someone in the ass."
What's really surprising about Bad Santa isn't its catalog of bad behavior, but its undercurrent of real contempt for holidays, organized religion, community, monogamy, the Puritan work ethic and everything else Americans supposedly hold dear. This undercurrent is flushed to the surface mainly through Thornton, whose performance updates old-fashioned movie cynicism to the new century: Think redneck Bogart, or W.C. Fields part rewritten by Charles Bukowski. Willie is a wreck-"Your soul is dogshit!" Marcus yells at him-but the actor brings grandeur to his ruination. Whether Willie is scamming on a sexy bartender with a Santa fixation (Lauren Graham of Gilmore Girls), cursing out kids who've come to beg for gifts or rejecting his partner's constructive criticism ("What, you shat me out of your womb, you're my mom now?"), Thornton's frank hatefulness suggests Willie has given up on life and had every right to.
A revealing moment has Willie summarizing the abuse inflicted on him by his own father. In the hands of another actor, this might have degenerated into a Hallmark moment, but Thornton recites the outrages shopping-list style, as if Willie believes that his was a normal American childhood. The film has contempt for "inspirational" products of the Hollywood assembly line, in which scumbag heroes redeem themselves. This contempt syncs up with Thornton's gift for seeing through the machinations of Hollywood screenplays, inviting audiences to see through them as well, then delivering the expected redemption twists with a Bill Murray-style "sincerity" that makes you unsure whether the character and the movie are kidding. After thrashing a local teenager for picking on the kid, Willie confesses to Marcus: "I beat the shit out of someone today. But it made me feel good about myself. Like I had a purpose."
Belleville starts out with flashbacks to the childhood of an adopted hero with the unlikely name Champion-a lonely fat kid who's given a purpose in life when his grandmother, the short, clubfooted, bespectacled Madame Souza, gives him a tricycle. Flash-forward to the present day, where Champion has become a formidable bicyclist, competing against other greats in a race. The plot kicks in when Champion and two other cyclists are inexplicably kidnapped from the race by black-clad goons who stash them in the back of a truck, dump them in the belly of a steamer ship and take them across the ocean. The plucky Madame Souza follows in a boat she's rented at the shore, tracking the bad guys through frighteningly huge and storm-tossed seas, then ending up in Belleville, a mythical international city that seems modeled equally on Manhattan, Quebec and Paris.
She rooms with the title characters, three gangly, grizzled, oddly happy old ladies who perform a cabaret act in which they make music from ordinary household objects, including refrigerator racks and a newspaper. Souza plays along with them (her instrument is a bike wheel, natch) and in her spare time, combs the city for evidence of her grandson. Souza is joined by Champion's pooch-a girl dog, inexplicably named Bruno, who tries to track her owner by scent. In one of the film's many brilliant, rebus-like sight gags, the camera disappears into the blackness of Bruno's nostril as she sniffs an article of her owner's clothing; the blackness dissolves to a shot of Champion dutifully riding his bike, then a shot of Bruno's dog dish. The image says, "This smells like the guy that used to feed me." (The crowning touch: Like all of the dog's many, elaborate dreams and flashbacks, this one is in black-and-white.)
Like the French whimsy specialist Jacques Tati, whom Chomet clearly idolizes (and pays tribute to with a sequence referencing Tati's Jour de Fete and a prominently placed one-sheet for Monsieur Hulot's Holiday) the movie has an obsessive quality, one that draws strength from a variety of sources. Some are obligatory: The ornate backgrounds and super-saturated colors recall 1940s Disney, and the massive panoramas of Belleville have a grungy majesty that suggests Akira, Rin Taro's Metropolis and other monumental works of anime. Others are delightfully obscure: the draftsmanship references the history of 19th- and 20th- century European cartooning, everything from the cabaret posters from 1890s Gay Paree to the rude caricatures of George Grosz to the kinetic action of Asterix comics.
The movie isn't right for kids under eight; it's visually dark. There are many Brothers Grimm touches (including the pointblank execution of a prisoner), and some of the humor is base and blunt in that very French way. (Chomet kids American obesity by drawing every third person in Belleville as a flesh-wrapped giant; in this faux New York, the Statue of Liberty is a fattie holding an ice cream cone.) At least the film's pointed, non-kid-friendly characteristics grow out of a specific world view rather than a crass Hollywood urge to pander to culturally debased kids and their immature parents. In that sense, Belleville's humor seems more honest and defensible than similar material in The Cat in the Hat, a grotesque comedy that turns a beloved work of literature originally aimed at preschoolers into a festival of product placement, physical cruelty, racy double-entendres and pee jokes that's completely inappropriate for kids under eight. (Dr. Seuss' widow is going to hell when she dies.)
Looney Tunes: Back in Action isn't as magnificent as Belleville, but it, too, is a feast of invention for slightly older children-and like Belleville, it has a demented integrity. Directed by pop culture obsessive, Joe Dante (Gremlins), the film puts Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and a studio security guard (Brendan Fraser) in the middle of a spy plot that has something to do with the head of the Acme Corporation (Steve Martin, of course) trying to turn the world's population into monkeys. The film finds room for a zillion cameos by stars of the Warner Bros. cartoon stable, including the Tasmanian Devil and Porky Pig, and there are several wizardly setpieces, including a bit where the characters jump in and out of paintings by French masters. Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the movie's merger of live action and animation is technically awesome at first, but eventually grows tiresome. But it's still f-f-funny, folks.