St Vin­cent

Would it be utter­ly sac­ri­le­gious to claim that Bill Mur­ray – beloved, wise­crack­ing rebel priest of the Hol­ly­wood Hills – is fun­nier off-screen than is he on? Tall tales regard­ing his predilec­tion for crash­ing stu­dent par­ties and zing­ing hys­ter­i­cal mem­bers of the pub­lic at film pre­miers, not to men­tion his wry respons­es in inter­views, often evoke more hon­est-to-good­ness chuck­les than the movies in which he stars (usu­al­ly play­ing some close iter­a­tion of Bill Mur­ray). Or maybe it’s the fact that few direc­tors know how to amply har­ness his tal­ents. The only mod­ern direc­tors to real­ly ​“get” Bill Mur­ray are Jim Jar­musch and Wes Anderson.

One of his fun­ni­est roles this year lasts for about 30 sec­onds and he spends all of that time hid­den behind a gas mask, play­ing Har­ry Dunne’s inter­im, meth­lab mon­key house­mate in Dumb and Dumb­er To while Lloyd spends time in a hos­pi­tal while he fakes being in a coma as a joke. He has one line of dia­logue and it’s pos­si­bly the fun­ni­est moment in the film. And like crys­tal meth, maybe Mur­ray is bet­ter tak­en in small dos­es, as being sad­dled with a full, 100-minute block in his pres­ence can prove to be some­what overwhelming.

The direc­to­r­i­al debut of one Theodore Melfi, St Vin­cent offers a sun­ny, more approach­able vari­a­tion on the Bad San­ta tem­plate where­by a can­tan­ker­ous, hate-fuelled lon­er learns through his awk­ward rela­tions to oth­ers that he’s not such a bad dude after all. Vin­cent MacKen­na (Mur­ray) lives alone with his cat, despis­es the com­pa­ny of oth­ers, drinks heav­i­ly, squan­ders his mea­gre funds at the race­track and pos­sess­es not a shred of human empa­thy. It’s not until gawky young Oliv­er (Jae­den Lieber­her) enters onto the scene, a child of divorce whose shit­bag father nev­er even taught him how to fight, that Vin­cent learns, once more, what love is. Awww…

Oliver’s moth­er (Melis­sa McCarthy) is now sole fam­i­ly bread­win­ner, and so Vin­cent puts in a few hours as a babysit­ter. No-one has a good word to say about Vin­cent, but spend­ing an inor­di­nate amount of time with him and play­ing by his strin­gent rules allows Oliv­er to see the good side of this heav­i­ly bur­nished soul. And not just good, pos­si­bly even great, ele­vat­ing him to the lev­el of an Earth­ly saint. An unsmil­ing Mur­ray sticks rigid­ly with­in his com­fort zone by play­ing per­pet­u­al­ly naffed-off which even­tu­al­ly grad­u­ates towards mild­ly miffed as the film reveals the bit­ter­sweet root of his rancour.

The process of watch­ing the film is one of delayed grat­i­fi­ca­tion, in that you tend to wait for Mur­ray to live up to his vaunt­ed image and do some­thing that’s extreme­ly hilar­i­ous. And while there are cer­tain­ly a scat­ter­ing of mild tit­ters, the big bel­ly laughs are in short sup­ply. Nao­mi Watts’ Russ­ian accent, the result of her play­ing a preg­nant strip­per and para­mour to Vin­cent, is actu­al­ly the com­ic top-trump of the entire film, with the usu­al­ly reli­able McCarthy unfor­tu­nate­ly land­ed with the nag­gy mom straight role.

As a state­ment on self-imposed pover­ty, St Vin­cent is per­haps too rosy and affir­ma­tive to real­ly hit home, and its con­stant recourse to big plot twists dulls the poten­tial for the­mat­ic heft. One very pleas­ing side-note is Chris O’Dowd as Broth­er Ger­aghty, a lib­er­al priest at Oliver’s school who would make the per­fect sub­ject for a spin-off movie.