St. Vincent (***)

This is part of the subgenre in which a grouchy adult gets saddled with an unwanted kid. In the case of Vincent (Bill Murray, sporting a Brooklyn accent), the kid is not entirely unwanted, since he’s charging the boy’s mom (Melissa McCarthy, in a subdued performance) twelve bucks an hour for after-school babysitting, and Vincent needs the money. In addition to grouchiness, Vincent comes with a full complement of vices — drunk driving, smoking, gambling (on horses), petty theft, a poor fashion sense, and an ongoing acquaintanceship with what he describes to the boy as a “lady of the night” (Naomi Watts, sporting a Russian accent). The boy, perhaps ten, is a typically precocious movie kid whose trademark is calling adults “sir,” though he appears to have grown up in New York.

With this kind of movie is that the plot is always going to be about the kid bringing out the grouchy adult’s humanity, so the trick is to this without getting all sappy or making the adult into an entirely new person. Writer-director Theodore Melfi mostly does this right until the too-clean ending. The money problems conveniently disappear (or seem to) and the whole thing seems calculated to sentimentalize Vincent (see title) and make the audience cheer. Entertaining characters — grouches usually are in movies — save the day, as do good performances, including always ingratiating Chris O’Dowd as a Catholic School teacher. The Brazilian movie Central Station remains a standard-bearer for the grouch-unwanted kid film, or, for a more comedic example, Kikujiro.

IMDb link

viewed 10/29/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5; posted 10/29/14