Movie critics have been accused of praising weirdo movies because we are bored by movies that seem the same. There is some justice in that. But I didn’t like this movie merely because it was weird and different. I liked it because it makes no compromises and takes no prisoners. And because it is funny.
The director is Terry Zwigoff. He made the great documentary Crumb, about R. Crumb, the cartoonist who is a devoted misanthrope. (Crumb drew the American Splendor comic books about Harvey Pekar, his equal in misanthropy.) Zwigoff also directed the quirky Ghost World, with its unlikely romantic alliance between a teenage girl (Thora Birch) and a sour, fortyish recluse (Steve Buscemi). This is a director who makes a specialty of bitter antisocial oddballs. That he does it in comedy takes more guts than doing it in tragedy.
Zwigoff worked from an original screenplay by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra. And what is their track record, you are wondering? They cowrote Cats and Dogs (2001), with its parachuting Ninja cats. Maybe screenwriters who do sweet, PG-rated movies like Cats and Dogs have a script like Bad Santa in the bottom desk drawer, perhaps in a lead-lined box.
When Billy Bob Thornton got the script, he must have read it and decided it would be career suicide. Then he put the script to his head and pulled the trigger. For him to play Hamlet would take nerve; for him to play Willie T. Soke took heroism. Wandering through the final stages of alcoholism, he functions only because of the determination of Marcus, who is played by Tony Cox as a crook who considers stealing to be a job, and straps on his elf ears every morning to go to work. Willie and Marcus always use the same MO: They use the Santa gig to get into the store, stay after closing, and crack the safe. Alas, this year the store’s security chief (Bernie Mac, also pissed off most of the time) is wise to their plan and wants a cut. Because it’s in his interest to keep Bad Santa in the store, he doesn’t report little incidents like the reindeer kicking to the store manager, played by the late John Ritter.
Willie becomes distracted by the arrival in his life of Sue (Lauren Graham), the Santa fetishist, who picks him up at a bar. Then there’s the kid (Brett Kelly), who sits on his lap, tells him he isn’t Santa Claus, and then doggedly insists on treating him as if he is. The kid is desperately lonely because his parents are away for reasons we understand better than he does, and he’s being looked after by his comatose grandmother (Cloris Leachman). I know, I know—I disapproved of the cruel treatment of the comatose babysitter Mrs. Kwan in The Cat in the Hat, and here I am approving of the way they treat the kid’s grandmother. The differences are: (1) This film is funny and that film was not, and (2) that one was intended for family audiences, and this one is not.
Is it ever not. I imagine a few unsuspecting families will wander into it despite the “R” rating, and I picture terrified kids running screaming down the aisles. What I can’t picture is who will attend this movie. Anybody? Movies like this are a test of taste. If you understand why Kill Bill is a good movie and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not, and Bad Santa is a good movie and The Cat in the Hat is not, then you have freed yourself from the belief that a movie’s quality is determined by its subject matter. You instinctively understand that a movie is not about what it is about, but about how it is about it. You qualify for Bad Santa.
Bridget Jones’s Diary
R, 95 m., 2001
Renée Zellweger (Bridget Jones), Colin Firth (Mark Darcy), Hugh Grant (Daniel Cleaver), Honor Blackman (Penny), Crispin Bonham-Carter (Greg), Gemma Jones (Bridget’s Mum), Jim Broadbent (Bridget’s Dad), James Callis (Tom), Embeth Davidtz (Natasha). Directed by Sharon Maguire and produced by Tim Bevan, Jonathan Cavendish, and Eric Fellner. Screenplay by Richard Curtis, Andrew Davies, and Helen Fielding, based on the novel by Fielding.
Glory be, they didn’t muck it up. Bridget Jones’s Diary, a beloved book about a heroine both lovable and human, has been made against all odds into a funny and charming movie that understands the charm of the original, and preserves it. The book, a fictional diary by a plump, thirty-something London office worker, was about a specific person in a specific place. When the role was cast with Renée Zellweger, who is not plump and is from Texas, there was gnashing and wailing. Obviously the Miramax boys would turn London’s pride into a Manhattanite, or worse.
Nothing doing. Zellweger put on twenty-something pounds and developed the cutest little would-be double chin, as well as a British accent that sounds reasonable enough to me. (Sight and Sound, the British film magazine, has an ear for nuances and says the accent is “just a little too studiedly posh,” which from them is praise.)
As in the book, Bridget arrives at her thirty-second birthday determined to take control of her life, which until now has consisted of smoking too much, drinking too much, eating too much, and not finding the right man, or indeed much of any man. In her nightmares, she dies fat, drunk, and lonely, and is eaten by Alsatian dogs. She determines to monitor her daily intake of tobacco and alcohol units, and her weight, which she measures in stones. (A stone is fourteen pounds; the British not only have pounds instead of kilos but stones on top of pounds, although the other day a London street vendor was arrested for selling bananas by the pound in defiance of the new European marching orders; the next step is obviously for Brussels to impound Bridget’s diary.)
Bridget’s campaign proceeds unhappily when her mother (who “comes from the time when pickles on toothpicks were still the height of sophistication”) introduces her to handsome Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), who is at a holiday party against his will and in a bad mood and is overheard (by Bridget) describing her as a “verbally incontinent spinster.” Things go better at work, where she exchanges saucy e-mails with her boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). His opener: “You appear to have forgotten your skirt.” They begin an affair, while Darcy circles the outskirts of her consciousness, still looking luscious but acting emotionally constipated.
Zellweger’s Bridget is a reminder of the first time we really became aware of her in a movie, in Jerry Maguire (1996), where she was so cute and vulnerable we wanted to tickle and console her at the same time. Her work in Nurse Betty (2000) was widely but not sufficiently praised, and now here she is, fully herself and fully Bridget Jones, both at once. A story like this can’t work unless we feel unconditional affection for the heroine, and casting Zellweger achieves that; the only alternate I can think of is Kate Winslet, who comes close but lacks the self-destructive puppy aspects.
The movie has otherwise been cast with dependable (perhaps infallible) British comic actors. The first time Hugh Grant appeared on-screen, I chuckled for no good reason at all, just as I always do when I see Christopher Walken, Steve Buscemi, Tim Roth, or Jack Nicholson—because I know that whatever the role, they will infuse it with more than the doctor ordered. Grant can play a male Bridget Jones (as he did in Notting Hill), but he’s better as a cad, and here he surpasses himself by lying to Bridget about Darcy and then cheating on her with a girl from the New York office. (An “American stick insect,” is what Bridget tells her diary.)