St. Vincent
Director: Theodore Melfi
Cast: Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy, Naomi Watts, Chris O’Dowd
Length: 102 minutes
Country: USA
By this point it’s pretty much a given that Bill Murray will always be an entertaining screen presence. It’s been twenty-five years since Caddyshack, and in that time we’ve seen a range of brilliant performances drawing on his inimitable skill for deadpan comedy and improvisation, to the point where he has attained the status of the coolest old man in Hollywood, bar none. Yet for his latest film, St. Vincent, the big question is: will the rest of the film keep up with him? Murray will always be good, but he’s appeared in some stinkers in his time – the latest being the stiffly boring The Monuments Men – and, unfortunately, it seems that St. Vincent belongs to that category. It’s a weakly-scripted, sentimental comedy that is perplexingly devoid of laughs, perhaps sweet in its intentions but sickly in its execution.
In fact, the whole film’s tone feels very wonky indeed.
Bill Murray plays Vincent, an obnoxious, offensive old man who kicks off the film by getting drunk and crashing his car into his fence. The thing is, he’s about as offensive as the film’s 12A certificate lets him, which is not very; he’s mostly just rude to people, but because he’s Bill Murray and because it’s Hollywood we know that he’s secretly hiding a heart of gold. Soon his new neighbors turn up, played by Melissa McCarthy and Jaeden Lieberher, and for some reason the former has been cast in the “straight” role. Yes, you heard that right: a talented and funny actress has been told, in a comedy, to consciously avoid being funny and instead talk about cancer and how depressed she feels. It’s weird. I mean, McCarthy can handle the dramatic material, but it just seems out of place.
In fact, the whole film’s tone feels very wonky indeed. Vincent soon develops a bond with Lieberher’s impressionable Oliver, and the two develop a father-son-style bromance, with the child’s obvious purpose to draw out the inner-nice person from him. Then, out of the blue, a plot twist arrives that drives the drama into melodrama territory. To be honest it’s actually the film’s most comfortable moment, since Murray is so adept at handling more serious material by this point (as with Lost in Translation) that he carries it off with ease; he’s given something to work with, and while it might not win him an Oscar, a Golden Globe is certainly on the cards. In the context of the overall picture, though, it’s just bizarre. It’s brushed over quite quickly, too, and the rest of the film becomes dedicated to making you cry. But with neither the dramatic chops to carry that off, nor the comedic chops to carry off this whole, you know, “comedy” thing, St. Vincent occupies the worst kind of middle ground. Admittedly, it’s not a nasty film – there’s no backwards morality like in Horrible Bosses 2 – but that’s just not good enough to excuse everything else.
It’s worth mentioning the rest of the cast, albeit briefly. In a weird bit of casting we have Naomi Watts playing a pregnant Russian sex worker, who somehow manages to nab the “Worst Accent of the Year” award from Jude Law’s recent Black Sea travesty, and whose entire character seems to be based on the assumption that Eastern-European stereotypes are funny enough to be presented unironically. Chris O’Dowd fares slightly better as a witty Catholic schoolteacher, although again, he’s an actor who could have done more with better material. Of course, at the end of the day it’s the Bill Murray show, and I’ll always enjoy watching him do his thing – I’d just rather have the rest of the picture measure up.
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