St. Vincent

When I first heard the buzz about writer-director Theodore Melfi's St. Vincent, I was a little dubious.

The movie sounds like the notes from a not terrifically productive spitballing story session, with Bill Murray taking on the archetypal Bill Murray role of Vincent MacKenna, a misanthropic Vietnam vet who lives in row-house squalor in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, doting on his cat while tolerating only a few associates who don't quite pass as friends. Aside from the people he sees in the drinking establishments he frequents, there's Daka (Naomi Watts), a Russian "lady of the night" who's pregnant by someone other than Vincent; and Zucko (Terrence Howard), a racetrack bookie to whom Vin owes a considerable sum.

And maybe the bookie isn't Vin's biggest problem, for in the movie's early scenes we learn that he has maxed out the reverse mortgage line of credit on which he was apparently living and is overdrawn at the bank. He's in such dire financial condition that he counts it as a stroke of luck when a moving van delivering his new neighbor's furniture accidentally takes out a tree limb that falls on his circa-1985 Chrysler LeBaron convertible. Vin immediately imagines that he can get the mover's insurance to pay for prior damage to his "valuable antique."

The new neighbor, Maggie (Melissa McCarthy), and her 12-year-old son, Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher), immediately complicate Vin's highly circumscribed life. Mutual need soon leads him to become the kid's baby sitter, which leads to the old veteran dragging Oliver around with him as he performs the few duties he has left to perform, pursuing the meager happiness that's available to him. And, in his curmudgeonly Morris Buttermaker-ly way, he becomes a mentor and role model to the youngster.

Yet, while all this sounds quite pat and smug, sometimes superb execution overcomes all. St. Vincent is perhaps the most entertaining and genuinely uplifting movie I've seen this year.

This is largely because the performances are all pitched to a key of slightly heightened reality -- the sort of movie performances that we tend to read as most authentic, where even highly recognizable actors like Murray and McCarthy seem to become the people they are playing. Every tic and grace note feels correct, including Murray's Brooklynized Irish accent. There's no superfluous showboating, and while the juvenile lead Lieberher mostly retains a beatific centeredness, there's nothing Disneyified or cloying in his performance. Whether that's just casting or a preternatural talent is impossible to say, but it doesn't really matter -- the kid stays in the picture, and for once he doesn't take us out of it.

And while dissolute Vin is a man of pretty shallow mystery -- it doesn't take long to discover that beneath his gruff exterior beats a compassionate heart -- his prime secret is genuinely affecting. It got to me.

It helps that the film is also very funny in the observational way that real people can be very funny, and that great care seems to have been used in selecting the settings and the supporting players. Chris O'Dowd is wonderfully cast as a priest who teaches in Oliver's school, and while Watts is not likely to cop any awards nominations for this role, she is fiercely comic.

The world needs more Bill Murray, in roles like this one, his best true lead role since Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers in 2005. (Come to think of it, if we discard his sorta stunty turn as FDR in 2012's Hyde Park on Hudson, this might be Murray's only real lead role since then.)

While the movie seems tailored to Murray's persona, it's not that difficult to imagine alternate casting -- Jack Nicholson or Robert Duvall might have seemed even more natural choices. Maybe Billy Bob Thornton could have pulled it off. Those all would have been very different films from the one we have, but I doubt they could have been better.

I don't know any way St. Vincent could have been made much better.

MovieStyle on 10/24/2014