The grumpy geezer Bill Murray plays in Ted Melfi’s gentle comedy St. Vincent is not exactly a stretch. Vincent is a down-on-his-luck gent festering in a falling-down row house on the butt end of Brooklyn. Familiar stuff happens: A little boy named Oliver with bowl-cut hair and a noticeably absent father moves in next door with his mother, Maggie (Melissa McCarthy).
Oliver, who’s played without undue cuteness by newcomer Jaeden Lieberher, is wise beyond his years, but puny and in need of help seeing off the school bully. Vincent is nobody’s idea of in loco parentis, but he needs the babysitting money and can offer Oliver the school of life via lessons in self-defense, trips to the racetrack and dive bars, etc., etc.
In return, Oliver offers living proof that some kids possess innate resilience, common sense and optimism that function independently of the rotten things that life hands them.
Other kooks are fed into the mix to create a cobbled-together family of putative losers. Naomi Watts, in tacky dress and a creditable Russian accent as a pregnant hooker, sashays in for weekly appointments with Vincent. Chris O’Dowd is Oliver’s sympathetic Catholic-school priest, and Terrence Howard makes a none-too-sinister loan shark trying to collect from Vincent.