Oddball comedy ‘St. Vincent' highlights saints in everyday life

Directed by Theodore Melfi (The Weinstein Company, 2014)

St. Vincent follows the growing friendship between Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher), a shrimpy misfit uprooted by his parents’ recent divorce, and Vincent (Bill Murray), his crass, alcoholic, world-hating neighbor. Oliver moves with his mother, Maggie (Melissa McCarthy), and starts attending a new school. Nearly broke, Vincent offers to watch Oliver after school while Maggie is at work. A comedy about a misanthropist and an awkward boy becoming unlikely friends, having wacky adventures—Oliver and Vincent often do so with a pregnant Russian stripper (Naomi Watts) riding shotgun—and learning heartwarming lessons is a familiar movie plot.

Luckily, St. Vincent is saved from derivative sappiness by the anger and barely contained grief that haunts its main characters. We discover the reason for Vincent’s rage, drinking, and financial ruin in a heartrending reveal halfway through the movie. Maggie’s life as a hardworking single mom could easily have been a movie cliché, but her sadness and anger over the dissolution of her marriage puts some hard edges on her warmth and affection for her son. Oliver, finally fed up with being harassed by the bigger kids at school, takes his small and furious revenge in one of the movie’s funnier scenes.

The movie gets its title from a class project at Oliver’s Brooklyn Catholic school, where the affable Brother Geraghty (Chris O’Dowd) asks his students to identify saints in everyday life. Citing Vincent’s courage, compassion, and saintly capacity for sacrifice, Oliver canonizes his neighbor “St. Vincent of Sheepshead Bay.” Grief is not on Oliver’s list of saintly qualities, but it clearly drives many of the characters’ actions, saintly or otherwise. Watching a band of oddballs move from grief to forgiveness is a surprising story arc to find in a comedy, and St. Vincent pulls it off with gusto.