Mrs. Walt had been nagging me for years, literally, that I don't take her to the movies any more. My excuse that the last one we went to -- Johnny Depp's The Rum Diary -- was one of the all-time great stinkeroos, had worn a bit thin. "That was nearly three years ago!", she said.
I countered that there are very few good movies coming out of Hollywood/Bollywood/Nollywood these days, just horror/action movies involving lots of loud noise, violence, and scary and depressing stuff. Why, I asked, aren't there any cheerful and/or uplifting movies? "Here's one that's right up your alley," the missus replied. "It's about Saint Vincent. The Legion of Decency* probably approves of it." So off we went.
Turns out the movie St. Vincent isn't really about any of the great saints of ages past. Instead, it's about a (fictional) present-day saint, played by Bill Murray, in the best performance of his career (IMHO). Here's the synopsis, from IMDb. A young boy whose parents have just divorced finds an unlikely friend and mentor in the misanthropic, bawdy, hedonistic war veteran who lives next door.
And here's the official trailer.
The trailer suggests to me that St. Vincent is being sold as a comedy. It is not, or at least not the type of Bill Murray comedy we're used to. Caddyshack or Ghostbusters it's not. Rather, it's a quite sentimental comedy-drama, with a really soppy (but nonetheless satisfactory) denouement, good for at least one hankie.
The plotline reminded me of As Good As It Gets, one of Jack Nicholson's less impressive efforts, although "Vincent" (Murray) is not as weird as Nicholson's character. The story is similar, although less complex. Struggling single mom with sickly kid is befriended, in spite of himself, by grumpy old curmudgeon. No LGBT-promoting side-plot in this one though.
"Oliver", the runty but clever boy who Vincent takes under his unshaven and grubby wing, is played very well by Jason Lieberher, a less-obnoxious young Macaulay Culkin.
Melissa McCarthy turns in a fine performance as "Maggie", the struggling, just-divorced mom. I found it laudable that the heroine of a movie set in today's America would be portrayed as a full-figured lady, rather than the untypical likes of Julia Roberts or Jennifer Aniston. Maggie has what Shakespeare would have called a soliloquy (telling her boy's teachers about the problems at home) which Ms McCarthy did so well as to cause a deal of muted sobbing and sniffing in the seats around me.
A commendable performance was also given by Chris O'Dowd as "Brother Geraghty", Oliver's religion teacher at St. Patrick's school. If only we really had truly Catholic schools like St. Patrick's, staffed by truly religious teachers like Brother Geraghty. But alas, St. Patrick's school is, in modern-day North America, fictional...very fictional.
Walt gives St. Vincent **** (four stars). I enjoyed it.
* Footnote: The Catholic Legion of Decency no longer exists as such. Its mission -- to identify and combat objectionable content in films and other media -- is now being carried on, in a desultory fashion, by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film and Broadcasting, to whom no-one pays the least bit of attention.
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