The year was 2003 when Terry Zwigoff He ventured into the swampy cinematographic genre of Christmas, a field often sown and, as far as successes are concerned, rarely harvested. This time it was going to be different. Director He used black humor to give a twist to the icon of Santa Claus, presenting an antithesis of his traditional figure and turning him, ultimately, into what gives the film its title: a Bad Santa.
Whoever dressed in red and sorrow was Billy Bob Thornton when entering the skin of Willie Stokes. His story, as if from a pact between unfortunate people, was born on a cold December night in a bar in Milwaukee. There he is. Drinking, smoking. Waiting for nothing, maybe for life. Lonely. He works as Santa Claus in a shopping centerwhere, in the company of his friend Marcus (Tony Cox), who plays the elf, entertains the already distracted shoppers. The crude portrait, almost Dickensian and typical of the 21st century, can be more devastating: They’re thieves.
As they do every Christmas Eve, they disconnect the security alarm after the mall takes down the metal shutters and busts the safe. The plot of the film focuses on the complications presented by the last of their coups, guarded by a security chief who suspects them from the first moment. And so, between chases that seem taken from a random dream, a plot is spun that is to Christmas in the cinema what a trip to the hidden side of the Moon is to aerospace engineering.
Thornton shines in this comedy, who understands how acting fits into this difficult line.. This has also been demonstrated in other works, both later and earlier. The performer, born in Arkansas around 1955, had a childhood marked by the Methodist Protestantism to which his family adhered. He played baseball and worked laying asphalt on roads almost forgotten by state maps. And as if it were an intra-American dream, in the mid-eighties he moved to Los Angeles and began to dedicate himself to acting.
From the peak to the almost disappearance
His career is completely vertical, slow and successful. Although he opened the decade as a telemarketing actor in a wind farm, he ended the next decade winning the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Sling Blade in 1996. Already someone with a reputation in the industry, after having started and ended a two-year relationship with Angelina Joliethrows himself fully into the adventure of Bad Santa and, also in 2003, appears in Love Actually acting, nothing more and nothing less, than President of the United States. A year later he received his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Good times.
The first decade of the new century was prosperous and this is reflected in the dense number of projects in which I participated. The culmination came in 2014 at the hands of Fargowhere his portrayal of the charismatic antagonist Lorne Malvo earned him a Golden Globe for best actor in a miniseries; another received two years later for his role as Billy McBride in Goliath.
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Since then he has only appeared in two projects, both in 2018, with the ironic parenthesis of the second part of Bad Santa in 2016. It happened without pain or glory. And now its cinematic silence is about to be broken, like a glacier with explosives in its frozen intestines, upon returning in 2024 through the front door in The Electric Statea film starring Millie Bobby Brown y Chris Patt. Gone are the days of that Bad Santa that on these dates some nostalgic people remember.
