The Good, the Bad and the Murray

Stop the presses! Bill Murray is back in a lead role. Short reaction: Meh. Longer reaction: Who really cares whether Murray is in a leading role or a supporting role as long as the movie is good?

As someone who appreciates a good Murray cameo (for example, Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control) and doesn’t always love a Murray lead (see Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers), the idea that he’s taking up a majority of the screen time in St. Vincent isn’t much of a boon. For every Ghostbusters there’s a The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Now, few movies are Steve Zissou bad. But unfortunately, St. Vincent isn’t Ghostbusters good. Or The Razor’s Edge weird. Or Where the Buffalo Roam head-scratching.

No, St. Vincent is middle-of-the-road seen-it-before. In fact, there’s already a 2014 template for it, and it’s called Bad Words. It stars and is directed by Jason Bateman. In 2008 it was a drama called Gran Torino. The animated version is Up. The trope goes like this: Cantankerous guy (usually but not always old) takes a kid under his wing and becomes less cantankerous.

Murray’s Vince is an in-debt layabout who gambles on the ponies, drinks way too much, has sex with a pregnant Eastern European prostitute (Naomi Watts, who exhibits a heretofore unseen sense of humor), and visits his Alzheimer’s-ridden wife in a luxury nursing home.

Maggie (Melissa McCarthy) and her young son Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher) move in next door. She’s a recently divorced CAT scan tech, and Oliver is a nice, smart dork with a surprisingly pragmatic outlook. Forget about the fact that kids in movies often sound like how the adult writing them wished they’d sounded when they were kids, and take at face value the contrivance of Vince becoming Oliver’s occasional babysitter.

That means Vince teaches Oliver how to fight, how to gamble and how to generally get in trouble. But the good news is Oliver’s such a naturally good kid, even he knows when Vince is showing him how to do stuff he shouldn’t be doing. The story’s one surprise is that Vince suffers a stroke about an hour into the movie, and there’s a decent chunk of screen time devoted to his recovery, which is an appropriately realistic touch in a movie that strives for realism but errs on the side of isn’t-it-funny-a-kid’s-gambling yuks.

As for how Vince becomes St. Vincent, it should be noted that Oliver goes to Catholic school. Praise be to baby Jesus and Pope Francis that Chris O’Dowd is on hand as the worldly and funny Brother Geraghty.

St. Vincent feels cobbled together from other movies (and not always better movies), and for that reason it fails to get the heartstrings singing. Not even Murray’s natural charm, smarm and playful deviousness can save it from feeling like an also-ran. His performance is high on Murrayishness (a plus, probably), and McCarthy does well as the straight man. Plus, the kid is good. The movie, on the other hand, isn’t.

Directed by Theodore Melfi

With Murray, McCarthy and Watts

UA DeVargas 6

PG-13
103 min.