BILL Murray, the closest thing pop culture has to a secular saint, makes it official in St Vincent, in which he’s canonised — if not literally, then pretty close to it — as America’s most cherished grizzled eccentric.

The man who made us fall for him, hard, in such classics as Saturday Night Live, Groundhog Day and Ghostbusters, has sealed the deal off-screen as well, famously crashing weekend kickball matches, taking tickets at baseball games, photobombing anyone with an iPhone and, on his time off, hitting George Clooney’s wedding just for yuks.

Murray musters every ounce of goodwill that he’s earned as a lovably gonzo-free spirit in St Vincent, in which he plays a grouchy, alcoholic ne’er-do-well who hires out to babysit the 12-year-old son of his new neighbour. In another movie, Vincent McKenna would be a tragic figure: as the movie opens, we see him stumble-down drunk, perilously driving himself back to his Sheepshead Bay home, taking out his fence in the process and passing out on his kitchen floor.

The scene is queasily unfunny. But when a single mom named Maggie (Melissa McCarthy) and her precocious son, Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher), show up the next day, writer-director Ted Melfi begins to send unmistakable signals that St Vincent isn’t going to be a cautionary downer about the heartbreak of drinking, ageing and angry isolation.

Soon enough, Oliver — literally left to his own devices in a new city, finding his school by way of Google Maps and GPS — has wormed his way into the heart of a man best described as a cross between Pigpen and Hunter S. Thompson.

Stopping by Vincent’s every day after class (an arrangement that helps the old man with some gambling obligations), Oliver learns how to eat sushi (sardines on a cracker), belly up to a bar and bet his lunch money on the trifecta at Belmont.

If it all sounds too adorable for words, that’s because it is: St Vincent faithfully follows every trope and cliche of the ingratiating kid-and-curmudgeon genre. Throw in a hooker with a heart of gold (Naomi Watts), a wisecracking Catholic school teacher (Chris O’Dowd) and some touching surprises in Vincent’s back story, and Melfi hits a trifecta all his own, shamelessly soliciting laughter, tears and sentimental sighs with the same ham-handed insistence as Vincent’s most thuggish debt collectors.

Still, like the man at its centre, it’s hard to stay mad at St Vincent for long, mostly because the performances are consistently appealing: McCarthy has finally found a toned-down role equal to her native sweetness and charm (she spends most of the film either in or on the verge of tears), and Melfi has found a gem in Lieberher, a disarming string bean of a kid who’s believable even when his character displays only-in-the-movies levels of wisdom and innocence.

Despite its many contrivances, the production has an easy, unforced tone made even mellower by a lovely soundtrack dominated by the likes of Jeff Tweedy and the National that, in the mainstream Hollywood version, would no doubt be replaced by generically chipper violins.

Make no mistake: the single element that keeps St Vincent from being worthy of that music is Murray, whose freewheeling, deadpan image fuses so thoroughly with Vincent’s own endearingly grizzled misanthropy that it’s hard to tell where the actor ends and the geezer begins.

As a showcase for Murray’s proven rapport with his audience, St Vincent occasionally threatens to become a self-congratulatory victory lap. But as a celebration, it’s a chance to revel in the Murray personae — wiseacre, hipster, humble man of the street and hell of a nice guy — that has allowed him somehow to reach mass-media stardom while retaining his own idiosyncratic niche. That may not be entirely tantamount to the courage, sacrifice, compassion and humanism that are elevated in the tear-jerking climactic moments of St Vincent, but in the world of showbiz, they’re heavenly enough.

—By arrangement with The Washington Post.

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2014

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