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