No wonder Bad Santa's sleighing us by Siobhan Synnot

FOR Hollywood studios, Christmas shopping must be a chaotic and anxious affair. In the months preceding the big event, the executives scurry around, toting back-of-the-envelope lists with different felt pen colours for each new thought ("Something nice for the PG family audiences. Something funny. Something with Brenda Blethyn or John Goodman in it.") Then in mid-October they realise they forgot to find the new Harry Potter and so, like the rest of us, studios keep gathering up more and more films for Christmas in a distracted fashion.

The outcome is inevitable. When the day finally arrives for allocating the booty, the executive is aghast at the mountains of mediocre stuff he has amassed and sits on the floor with his fingers in his mouth as he realises to his horror that something has to be done with his surfeit of Santa films.

Christmas movies are an awful thing, the God-bless-us qualities of a certain type of seasonal offering often suggesting that some movie-makers have either a very dim perception of how much tinsel, good cheer and soaring background choirs the average person can stand - or else that these auteurs possess an awe-inspiring misanthropy. Certainly no one seems to have considered the audience.

Far worse than watching the latest redemption of Scrooge is the glut of Father Christmas movies that have arrived this year. For a start, Santa isn’t even an authentically ancient and venerable part of Christmas. He’s not religious or traditional. He just represents the tendency of modern culture to conflate things until they achieve the right harmonic balance of a mass marketing logo.

Yet up he pops this year necking booze in Bad Santa, in a reindeer-drawn Volkswagen for Christmas With the Kranks, and ho-ho-ho-ing in Surviving Christmas. This month’s animated feature Polar Express also unintentionally underscores the uneasy side of Mr Claus. The main gimmick of Express is its cutting-edge computer animation, where authentically human movements and gestures were achieved by sticking little indicators all over the actors’ bodies and using these tracking devices as guides for creating animated replicas.

The limitation of the technology, however, is that you cannot stick these guides on eyeballs, which have to be animated separately and not entirely successfully. To put it bluntly, the Polar Express Santa looks like a traditional Santa, moves like Tom Hanks, yet has the cold, thousand-mile stare of a corpse.

He also serves as a reminder that Santa really doesn’t have much going on behind the eyes anyway. Just what is Santa’s character arc, exactly? Dramatically, he has very few ambiguities in his life - up at the North Pole human nature can be swiftly sorted as either "naughty" or "nice". The last time he and Mrs Claus shared a moment of warmth and intimacy was when they discovered there were no council water charges at the North Pole. He’s not struggling to make it through life, just down the chimney. In short, Santa has no depth or complexity to his life; in comparison, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s characters are veritable cauldrons of inner unresolved conflicts.

Even when he’s the focus of films such as Santa Claus and The Santa Clause 2, real interest is ignited not by Claus but his supporting cast. The nearest we get to existentialism is Miracle on 34th Street, which put the Macy’s Santa on trial and posed the question - is Father Christmas real? A more savage take on this line of inquiry was offered in the 1980 horror film You’d Better Watch Out, where a boy who loves Christmas discovers Santa doesn’t exist and is scarred for life. As an adult toy-maker, he tries to keep the Christmas spirit alive, but eventually modern cynicism pushes him to breaking point and he embarks on a bloody festive killing spree.

No wonder our best Santa in years also happens to be the worst in the world. In Bad Santa, Billy Bob Thornton’s part-time department store Santa is a seasonal safecracker and a foul-mouthed, cantankerous drunk all year round. Forget milk and a biscuit, this Santa is powered by whiskey and hookers. And for those of us jaded by too many over-packaged seasonal movie offerings, he’s a Christmas gift that just keeps on giving.

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