Film / Reviews
St. Vincent
St. Vincent (12A)
USA 2014 102 minutes Dir: Theodore Melfi Starring: Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy, Naomi Watts, Chris O’Dowd, Terrence Howard, Jaeden Lieberher
Bill Murray as the world’s most inappropriate, curmudgeonly, dishevelled, whoring, boozing, chain-smoking, gambling babysitter? Bring it on! Who needs a script, eh? That seems to have been the notion behind Theodore Melfi’s feature debut. It leans so heavily on Murray playing to his considerable strengths that it hopes we won’t notice the whole thing is mired in increasingly formulaic, sentimental slush. At least the ghastly sickbucket climax is telegraphed at a fairly early stage in the proceedings, signalling the appropriate juncture at which to make good your escape.
As usual with films of this nature, the first act is the best, before Hollywood Morality kicks in and the disgraceful central character is humanised, redeemed or receives a dreary comeuppance. The brisk opening credits sequence establishes Vincent (Murray) as a grouchy, broke, unshaven, drink-driving loner who slumps on his sofa surrounded by crap. His only friends appear to be Grumpy Cat and a pregnant Eastern European prostitute/dancer named Daka (Watts), whom he forces to do all the work by going on top. Enter new neighbour Maggie (McCarthy, whose talents are thrown away in a thankless straight role) and her weedy son, Oliver (Lieberher). After an initial altercation, irascible Vincent figures out that he can exploit this harassed single mother by volunteering his $12-an-hour babysitting services. Much fun is had as he introduces the boy to the joys of the racetrack and strip club, and teaches him how to stand up for himself by beating the crap out of bullies.
But a sub-plot in which Oliver is encouraged to think about the nature of sainthood by a liberal Catholic priest (O’Dowd on autopilot) points the way to Vincent’s rough edges being sanded down and his underlying humanity exposed. This wouldn’t be quite so bad if it wasn’t done in such a lazy, clumsy, sappy and manipulative fashion. On the plus side, although Naomi Watts is lumbered with that stock character the tart with a heart, she does succeed in wringing plenty of laughs from it and even steals the occasional scene from Murray – notably when heavily accented Daka struggles with the language of political correctness (“What is wrong with ‘retard‘?”). More of this and she might eventually eradicate the stain of ‘Diana’ from her CV.
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