REVIEW: St. Vincent

8/10 - What are you waiting for a paper invitation? 

This is one of my favorite movies of 2014. It's also probably my favorite Bill Murray role of the last 10 years. It's also probably going to get reviews saying it's mediocre and predictable. Even so, I don't care, St. Vincent just hits me in the right way.

The rundown is this: Bill Murray plays Vincent, a misanthropic asshole who smokes and drinks, hangs out with prostitutes and has lost all him money gambling. His new neighbor Maggie movies in with her kid Oliver. Vincent ends up hanging out with Oliver, watching him after school while Maggie works long hours trying to support her family as a newly single parent.

I'm just going to say this now. If you are the least bit cynical or go in expecting beginning to end belly laughs, you'll be disappointed. Fortunately I'm a big softy deep down, so coming of age combo-love your family drama is right up my ally.

What I found refreshing about St. Vincent is that the characters are not trapped inside the vacuum of the protagonists journey. All the characters in this film come from different backgrounds, and have different conflicts in their lives, different with points of view, and all grow and change by the end. No one is a villain for the sake of being bad, or good for the sake of innocence. It's almost the opposite of Chef, where there were clear character roles and good things happened making the audience feel good. In this case, the character roles fluctuate and major obstacles come up in an unexpected way. But it still makes the audience feel good. 

Like I said, Bill Murray is fantastic. It's nice to see actors out of their comfort zones, and Bill Murray has fallen into this trap of playing characters almost exactly like himself. While his charm does a huge favor in this role to make an unlikable character more palatable, Vincent is something out of the ordinary for him. Melissa McCarthy too. I can't remember McCarthy ever playing a straight role. She's a mom, a nurse, she's struggling, she's real. For someone who normally play's characters so over the top they are basically cartoons, this is a fresh revelation. When I read the script I was in total disbelief that Naomi Watts would work in her role, and she definitely changed my mind. It's a great cast who really surprises. I think it's a real credit to writer/director Theodore Melfi who got the best out of this pool of talented actors. 

I'm a big fan of St. Vincent. It might be a bit paint by numbers, a bit cliche, and a bit saccharine but I like a movie that doesn't shy away from those elements. It's easy to be critical of a movie that relies on sentimentality but that doesn't take away from the quality of the story. At the end of the day I was rooting for the kid, laughing at the jokes and enraptured by the ending. Isn't that what we watch movies for?

IMDb - St. Vincent (7.3)
Wikipedia - St. Vincent
Rotten Tomatoes - St. Vincent (77%)
Amazon.ca - St. Vincent