MOVIE REVIEW
“St. Vincent”
Grade: B
Starring Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy and Naomi Watts. Directed by Theodore Melfi.
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material including sexual content, alcohol and tobacco use, and for language. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 43 minutes.
Bottom line: A strong cast does a good job with sometimes-slight material
By Betsy Sharkey
Los Angeles Times
Soaked in whiskey, dipped in brine, Bill Murray delivers a salty, acerbic, inebriated comic blast as the unlikeliest saint imaginable in “St. Vincent.”
The film, written and directed by Ted Melfi, is about paying homage to those overlooked and underappreciated good souls we bump into every day. In a roundabout way, “St. Vincent” delivers, though less as a film than a platform for an object lesson by St. Bill in effortless acting.
You see it in the opening scene in a Sheepshead Bay bar with Vincent, the curmudgeon Murray plays, pushing everyone’s buttons. It continues mostly unabated until the credit-rolling last image of Vincent slumped in a ratty lawn chair singing along to Dylan’s “Shelter From the Storm.”
Those final moments also serve as a nice coda for a film that is all about the storm. Vincent represents his own kind of turbulence. His stinging verbal assaults hit hard and fast, and few are spared. His favorite new target is Maggie (Melissa McCarthy), a stressed single mom in a messy divorce who’s just moved in next door with her son, Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher). Their across-the-broken-fence wars and truces and reluctant dependence drive the film.
Vincent is battered as well. A Vietnam vet with bad memories, his wife (Donna Mitchell) has dementia and lives in an assisted-living facility he can no longer afford. The Russian immigrant pole dancer Daka (Naomi Watts) he fancies is pregnant, broke and owed for services rendered. There is a growing gambling debt for money lost at the track and an increasingly unhappy bookie named Zucko (Terrence Howard).
Melfi has assembled a strong cast that does a good job with the sometimes-slight material. McCarthy, who is so often over the top in films such as “Bridesmaids,” “Identity Thief” and “The Heat,” shifts to softer, more vulnerable notes, tapping into the sincere side that first made her so watchable on the prime-time family soap “Gilmore Girls.”
Watts is a hoot, from the Russian accent to the way she plays the pregnant pauses during a pole dance.
Things are coming to an angry head on all fronts when an accident intervenes, or maybe it’s a higher power. It makes Vincent more dependent than he’s ever been. While Murray goes right there with him, it’s a little rocky. Meanwhile, Oliver’s hard at work on Brother Geraghty’s everyday saint assignment, which is where “St. Vincent” was heading from the start — cheese and sentiment threaten to blow through and break things apart.
There are times “St. Vincent” seems rather like young Oliver, very much a work in progress. Still, it’s hard to complain too much about the growing pains with Murray running so wonderfully amok in nearly every scene.
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