CINEMA Desperate measures

Crusty old man, struggling single mom, feisty kid . . . it could go either way

cash to his Russian hooker (Watts), who visits his decaying, filthy home to service him. Women may not laugh at this portrait.

At first, we know very little about Vincent, as Murray is named. That he is nasty and isolated is demonstrated in flashes of serious ugliness. Murray can fall about a room with the best of farcical protagonists, but here it’s repellent.

Lieberher’s mother (a trimmed-down McCarthy, herself attaining moments when she escapes her traditional role as an object of unwieldy mirth) is compelled to ask Vincent for help when she has to work late.

Her desperation, fighting for custody of the boy in a vicious divorce, fuels her considerable, and neglected, skills in the part. By turning to the Murray figure, she’s unaware at first that her child will be taken to Vincent’s barroom haunts, strip clubs, drug deals and the racetrack — and also absorb at least some of his misanthropic violence. Yet in turn Vincent’s motives — his Vietnam record, dying wife, secretive generosity and bitter blows of fate — are slowly revealed and he becomes the (ironically intended) “saint” of the title.

The film is sporadically very funny. When Lieberher enrols at a new, Catholic school and is asked by his worldly-wise Bill Murray and Jaeden Lieberher Babysitting with a difference teacher (O’Dowd) about his religion, he responds: “I think I’m Jewish.” This becomes a bullying catchphrase at the school until Vincent teaches him how to fistfight and he earns his schoolyard stripes in spectacular fashion. There is no particular moral in this sequence. The cast has been assembled to show evidence of city grit in their harried features.

What some critics have objected to in St Vincent is its sentimentality. The Guardian review referred to it as “slush”, which unavoidably applies to the various contrivances that flow into the falsely happy climax. Of the situation-comedy basis of those final scenes, the old-young tussle is primary. We have perhaps seen too many