St. Vincent (2014)

St. Vincent arrives with the tired confidence of a film that knows precisely which buttons it intends to press. Bill Murray plays Vincent MacKenna, a misanthropic Vietnam veteran in Sheepshead Bay who smokes, gambles, drinks, and swears, and who becomes redeemable the moment a small boy needs a babysitter. The machinery shows in the first frame. A divorced mother works late shifts. A lonely child requires supervision. A gruff neighbor with a buried heart answers the call. Theodore Melfi writes and directs with a sentimental streak he never apologizes for, and the result is warm, watchable, and thoroughly familiar.

The supporting cast supplies variety without comment. Terrence Howard menaces as a loan shark, Naomi Watts labors under a Russian accent as a pregnant sex worker, and Maria Elena Ramirez appears as a nanny. They are texture around a white veteran and a white boy, and the film never asks a question about any of it. Melissa McCarthy's Maggie carries a bitter divorce and a custody battle with genuine fatigue, though the story's affections belong to Vincent and to Oliver. Race stays off the table entirely. So does the environment, the body, the mind, and the historical record, all of which the film declines to notice.

Money troubles do surface: gambling debts, threatening collectors, nursing-home fees Vincent cannot pay. The film frames these as one man's bad luck, not as a system worth examining. The closing assembly speech, in which Oliver nominates Vincent for sainthood on grounds of commitment, dedication, and sacrifice, lands as a warm homily. It wants a tear, not a conversion. St. Vincent is a gentle film about a difficult man, and gentle is the operative word. It preaches softly, to no one in particular, and mostly to itself.

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