Old Yorker

  • St Vincent

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Theodore Melfi (2014)

    The main character’s name is Vincent McKenna.  Two-thirds of the way through, the Catholic priest-teacher at the school attended by Oliver Bronstein, whose ‘babysitter’ Vince has become, announces a project:  Oliver and his classmates are each to nominate a real life saint.  In view of the film’s title, it’s pretty clear who will be Oliver’s choice.  This gives an idea of the predictability of Theodore Melfi’s screenplay (St Vincent is his first feature as a director).  Vince lives alone, in Brooklyn.  Maggie Bronstein, whose marriage has broken up, and her son Oliver move in next door.  Maggie asks her new neighbour if he can keep an eye on the boy before she gets home in the evening from her long-hours job at a local hospital.  Vince gives Oliver an unorthodox after-school education, taking him to Belmont Park racecourse and to a local bar – places where Vince, addicted to gambling and alcohol, usually spends much of his time.  The film was being reviewed on Radio 4’s Front Row when I switched on the other night – a conversation between an enthusiastic presenter and a critic whose name I didn’t catch.  The latter suggested Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885) as the prototype for the old-git-transformed-by-good-natured-child story told in St Vincent but I’m not sure this is right, on two counts.  Silas Marner (1861) is one example of an earlier (and exceptionally rich) development of the same storyline.  More to the point, Vince McKenna isn’t really transformed – it’s rather a case of other people realising what a fundamentally fine man he is.  Vince may be louche and curmudgeonly but he’s also revealed, in due course, to have been a war hero in Vietnam and a devoted husband.  (His wife of many years is in a home, suffering from pre-senile dementia:  Vince insists on doing her laundry each week.)  This sequence of attributes summarises the film’s prevailing tone – a mixture of, or alternation between, irony and sentimentality.  St Vincent is pretty feeble but a few of the actors make it easily watchable and sometimes enjoyable.

    I turned off Front Row when the critic explained that the grumpy-old-man transformation tale was becoming a movie sub-genre and offered as an example of it About Schmidt, which isn’t any such thing.  It may be that she was getting confused with As Good As It Gets and that Jack Nicholson, the star of both movies, was the cause of her confusion:  the critic had also just mentioned that Nicholson was approached to play Vince McKenna.   Even if this is right and Bill Murray wasn’t first choice for the role, it’s hardly unexpected to see him cast as Vince – or, at least, as the man Vince initially appears to be.  Murray would seem to be very miscast as a reformed character:  Theodore Melfi’s impatience to conceal Vince’s nobler qualities is therefore something of a blessing in disguise – although the lack of shape to the film’s development of Vince is the result primarily of sloppy writing.  Melfi is consistent only in neglecting to follow things through and in effecting easy reconciliations and emotional highlights.  A few examples …  Oliver first has to rely on Vince’s hospitality on his first day at his new school when some other kids steal his mobile, house keys etc – a theft that never seems to be reported to his mother.  (Melfi wants to present Maggie as so anxiously preoccupied with making ends meet and with contesting her ex-husband’s attempts to get custody of Oliver that she takes no interest in what her son does when he’s with Vince.)   The same kids who steal from him continue to bully weedy Oliver until Vince sorts them out and teaches Oliver how to stand up for himself.  The most obnoxious of the bullies then instantly becomes his best friend, with a thoroughly nice personality.   While the selection of Vince as Oliver’s saint is blindingly obvious, the scale of the canonisation ceremony is rather surprising.  The kids make speeches in an assembly hall to an audience that includes not only their parents but also most of the people whom we’ve seen feature in Vince’s life.  The attempts at physical comedy are ropy so it’s as well that they’re infrequent – though Melfi stuffs a series of domestic mishaps into the first few minutes of the film.

    Bill Murray’s bone-dry putdowns and stoned, deadpan expressions of cafard have become too familiar by now:  in order to surprise, he needs dialogue and situations stronger than those which Theodore Melfi supplies.  One of Murray’s best bits comes when the film’s closing titles come up:  during these, Vince is shown lying in a lounger outside his house, trying to water his grassless garden with the minimum effort.  Even here, though, what Murray does isn’t comically inventive enough to last throughout the credits – and it seems pretty cynical on Melfi’s part to assume that doesn’t matter because few people see out the closing titles anyway.   Bill Murray’s persona helps to mitigate the sentimentality of St Vincent but isn’t enough to transcend it.  When Vince eventually takes the stage to acknowledge his sainthood and Oliver thanks him, Melfi might at least have given Murray something a bit spicier than a  ‘Thanks, kid’ to mutter in response.   St Vincent is persistently bland.  Chris O’Dowd’s Brother Geraghty may be an ordained Catholic priest but he’s wryly aware how uncool it is to be one.  Vince’s gambling debts are such that a man called Zucco and a sidekick come round to Vince’s house and the sidekick lays Vince out but Zucco, at least as played by Terrence Howard, looks to be acting more in sorrow than in anger.  The knockout punch appears to cause Vince to suffer a stroke, which at least allows Bill Murray a few amusing moments in the speech therapy that follows.

    It’s a real pity that Melissa McCarthy as Maggie is given so few comic opportunities:  whenever she does have a potentially good line, McCarthy’s delivery is perfect – funny and true.   Naomi Watts is emphatically cast against type – as Dana, a Russian pole-dancer-cum-prostitute, who’s carrying Vince’s child.  (His long marriage appears to have been childless; you get next to no idea what he thinks about becoming a father for the first time in his sixties.)  I thought at first that Watts was going to be awful:  she seemed grimly determined to make the most of a comedy character.  But she improves, in spite of Dana’s turning into a more or less clichéd golden-hearted whore.  Watts looks believably Russian too.   I also feared at the start that Oliver would be regularly producing one-liners that suggested a precocious world-weariness and made the boy a kind of pre-adolescent Bill Murray.   Eleven-year-old Jaeden Lieberher, in his first feature film role, seemed overeager imparting these witticisms.  Here too, though, the inconsistency of the writing is actually helpful:  Oliver’s character is fuzzily written but, as a result, Jaeden Lieberher can’t be on the button.  His playing is intelligent and he’s increasingly likeable.  Ann Dowd, in the small role of an administrator at the care home where Vince’s wife is a patient, is much more nuanced than the writing of the character deserves.  Theodore Shapiro’s twinkly, meandering score goes perfectly with Theodore Melfi’s direction.

    5 December 2014

  • Sparrows Can’t Sing

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joan Littlewood (1963)

    Surprisingly hard going – although it has its place in history as the only dramatic feature directed for the cinema by Joan Littlewood.   She worked with Stephen Lewis on this adaptation of his stage work Sparrers Can’t Sing – a success for Theatre Workshop (and then in the West End) in 1960 – but she didn’t find a way of marrying the realism of the East End locations (in Limehouse and Stratford) with the prevailing acting style.  (If the intention was to isolate the two elements from each other, it’s hard to see why – given the importance of local community in the material.  In any case, a few of the cast do seem naturally rooted in their setting.)  The Theatre Workshop players were retained for the film version but their performances are often disappointingly ‘set’.  There are moves which look as if they might have been inventive on stage but which haven’t been rethought for the screen.  There are characterisations which look to have been worked out in the theatre run and not developed or refreshed (Roy Kinnear, Brian Murphy), and others which it’s hard to believe weren’t grim at the first time of asking (Barbara Ferris, Lewis himself, Victor Spinetti).

    The story takes place in the course of a single day.  Charlie (James Booth), a sailor, comes home from sea.  He finds his house razed to the ground.  He can’t find his wife Maggie (Barbara Windsor), who’s now living with Bert (George Sewell), a bus driver, and has a new baby (there’s a running debate about who the father is).    Will Maggie choose to stay with Bert or go back to Charlie?   James Booth, although his acting isn’t free of bits of what look like theatre business, is physically relaxed and the strongest screen actor:  the camera seems to be revealing Charlie’s character rather than recording the actor’s projecting it.   It’s hard to dissociate Barbara Windsor from her more familiar film persona because she looks and sounds and (especially) moves as usual – but there’s depth to her work.  She’s convincingly inconstant and volatile in her feelings for the two men, which makes it suspenseful as to whom she’ll choose.  (It’s clear too that the ending of the film is where it happens to stop and not an indication of the long-term future).   George Sewell was a very good character actor.  He may be too quietly naturalistic here, given the storyline, but he’s a welcome relief from the busyness of much of the acting going on around him.

    The panel discussion of Joan Littlewood’s legacy in the first part of the BFI birthday tribute that preceded the screening of Sparrows Can’t Sing stressed repeatedly that the original was all about the destruction of community, especially through the demolition of houses to make way for tower blocks.    This doesn’t come across strongly in the film – partly because the characterisation of these East Enders is so insistent that they seem impregnable.  One of the best sequences I took to be, in part, an early celebration of increasing ethnic diversity:   Charlie, in search of Maggie, climbs several flights of stairs and finds an Asian father and son on one floor, a group of Africans on the next.   This raises an issue that the screenplay understandably steers clear of wrestling with:  much of the indigenous population would have seen Commonwealth immigration as itself a symptom of the decline of local identity and tradition.   There are other respects too in which the film is striking because the behaviour it describes is now accepted as unacceptable – Sparrows is cheerfully matter of fact about Charlie’s propensity for hitting Maggie in their earlier life together.

    The cast also includes, among others, Avis Bunnage, Harry H Corbet, Yootha Joyce, Fanny Carby and Murray Melvin.  Corbett is striking in a cameo as a market stallholder.  Melvin is too eccentric for a juvenile lead role, even a quirky one like this, but he’s still good to watch because he’s so physically and vocally extraordinary.  As a nosy neighbour high in the tower blocks, Rita Webb is wonderfully funny and verbally rhythmical in her few minutes on screen.   Gerry Raffles makes a fleeting appearance as a lorry driver.

    6 October 2008

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