The beloved actor has starred in genuine classics, but lately he has had more mediocre films than good ones. Owen Gleiberman reviews his latest film St Vincent from the Toronto Film Festival.
How pathetic and gone-to-seed is Vinnie, the grumpy old wreck played by Bill Murray in the glorified sitcom St Vincent? Vinnie, who has spent his life in the working-class Brooklyn neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay, is a self-destructive loser who smokes like a chimney and lives at the local dive bar, where he cracks ancient bad jokes about how he likes to "work out" by lifting a bourbon glass. He strolls the streets in slippers and grey socks, and he drives a beat-up convertible jalopy with decaying wood paneling on the doors – a car that, naturally, he ends up driving through his white picket fence when he arrives home drunk one night. Vinnie owes money to just about everybody. Even his facial hair is lousy: a greying soul patch he can barely shave symmetrically.
And yet, since Vinnie is played by Murray, we know that he's got a heart of gold buried beneath those bad habits. And since Murray has been mentoring on-screen buddies since his first movie, Meatballs, made in 1980, what could possibly coax out the irresistible cuddly goodness in Vinnie more than befreinding the kid next door? Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher) – who has the requisite saucer eyes, cowlick, scrawny physique and expression of perpetual, cowed innocence – has just moved in, and he's having some problems. His mother, Maggie (Melissa McCarthy, atypically earnest), is going through an ugly divorce; she's a medical technician who works extended hours and can't be home when he gets out of school. So she hires Vinnie to babysit, and Vinnie makes it clear that the $11 an hour she's paying him is the only reason he's doing it.
At least, that's true until Oliver gets attacked by a trio of skateboarding bullies. In the space of about three seconds, Vinnie goes all soft and gooey and protective. He's got to teach the poor kid how to defend himself – that is, how to fight. And once Oliver learns to throw a right hook, Vinnie also teaches him how to play the horses, how to sit like an adult at a bar and how to swear. Are you cracking up at the outrageousness yet? After a while, we're supposed to pick up on the fact that Vinnie, beneath the selfishness he wears like a shield, actually spends a great deal of time looking after other people. He looks after his wife, who has Alzheimer's; he goes to visit her at a posh managed-care facility and does her laundry once a week, but mostly he lights up when he sees her. He also takes care of Daka (Naomi Watts), the blowsy, pregnant Russian-born stripper and prostitute he ‘dates’.
St Vincent is the sort of comedy that turns the coy celebration of bad behaviour into a quintessentially fake crowd-pleaser. (The movie will please crowds at festivals more easily than it does anywhere else.) It's packaged as ‘classic’ Murray, yet after the well-intentioned misfire of his 2012 FDR drama, Hyde Park on the Hudson, and his appearance in the deadly Monuments Men, Murray could use a star vehicle that, for once, doesn't insist on turning his persona into a brand. At an event like TIFF, it's almost insidious the way that viewers who crave artistic freshness but have also been schooled in glib television tropes can be persuaded into thinking that a movie like this one is the former rather than the latter. The audience at the premiere screening where I saw St Vincent responded on Pavlovian cue to the film's cutesy, aging-rebel theatrics, but, really, Bill Murray deserves a better movie.
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