There’s no away around it, and it pains me to believe it considering how big a fan I am of his previous films, but Jeff Nichols‘ much-anticipated Midnight Special is a disappointment. How a film that packs so much promise with its director, cast, and synopsis can leave such a flat impression is something that I’ll be mulling over during Berlinale and beyond. A story of a close-knit family with a boy who’s got special powers, on the run from a religious cult and the government, pulsates with potential. But not even the commanding Michael Shannon can save this film from being Nichols’ first major misfire.

As most disappointments often do, things start off so well. With zero exposition, we’re thrust into the action of Ray (Shannon) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton, at his understated best here) on-the-run with 8-year-old Alton (Jaeden Lieberher) and before the brilliant title sequence even comes up, we’ve already got a hundred questions. Why is the young lad wearing goggles? Who are these men? Why is the government, who is making this national news, after them? The mystery is instantly gripping, and even more so once the Ranch—a cult that believes Alton’s words are gospel—gets involved. They want him because they believe he’s their savior, the FBI and the NSA are after him because they think he’s a weapon, and all Roy wants to do is bring him back to his mother (Kirsten Dunst) and make sure he’s where he’s got to be on Friday, March 6th, a.k.a. Judgement Day. Oh, and the boy speaks in tongues, has telepathic connections with radio signals, and shoots blue light from his eyes.

Basically, you’d have to check your pulse if you weren’t totally sucked in by the halfway mark. But as the mystery begins to unravel further, delusions of grandeur set in. The big mystery, all those gripping question marks, amount to one big “OK, that’s it?” shrug by the end. Adam Stone’s cinematography is excellent, the performances are predictably stellar, Nichols expertly directs a couple of stand-out sequences, but the story gets lost in a vague haze of questionable decisions and a final climax utterly deflated of the emotional oomph it’s supposed to have. It has its grand familial Spielbergian flourishes, but Midnight Special ends up being disappointingly ordinary and surprisingly forgettable.

Rating:
6.5/10

Bill Murray as a sourpuss isn’t a stretch. He has played unlikeable to absolute likability on many occasions, especially as the grand master curmudgeon Scrooge in Scrooged and as the primadonna news anchor in Groundhog Day. Using him in older age as the prosaic “Grumpy Old Man” seems a natural progression. So here he is in writer-director Theodore Melfi’s newest film St. Vincent and it would be easy to write the film off for its somewhat uninspired lead casting and its familiar storyline. But strangely what makes St. Vincent work isn’t the believability of Bill Murray in the role based on past work, or that he brings any of his usual sensitivity to the role, it’s that for once, he doesn’t. He keeps up his coarseness throughout the entire film, and strangely, it works.

In the film, Murray is Vincent, a Brooklyn native living alone, spending his days gambling, drinking, dodging those he owes money, and shacking up with Daka (Naomi Watts), the pregnant Russian prostitute who counts as his only friend. Disturbing his usual routine is Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher), the new kid next door, whose single mother Maggie (Melissa McCarthy) is at her wits end trying to provide for her and her son while dealing with her ex’s custody battle. After bullies at school steal his house keys, Oliver spends an afternoon with Vincent and an unlikely babysitting situation emerges. Vincent needs money, Maggie needs childcare, it all works out. Except of course that Vincent isn’t exactly babysitter material. His idea of supervising Oliver includes trips to the race track, threatening Oliver’s bullies, visiting his alzheimer-stricken wife in her convalescent home, and hanging out in his favorite bar.

At first glance the film’s eventual plot conclusion seems a given. In these situations an emotional transformation seems inevitable. And while the incredibly clever Oliver does end up seeing the good in Vincent, deciding to feature him in a school project around finding everyday saints, the film focuses more on forgiveness and modern patchwork family formation than personal growth. Lieberher and Murray’s chemistry sells it. It would be easy to focus on Murray’s performance as the impetus for the film working, but Lieberher plays Oliver as more than just a sorry sort of kid, infusing him with real empathy and cleverness.

McCarthy’s usual rambling gimmick is put to best use here, for once giving her a chance to do so with the emotional realism of a frazzled mother. Chris O’Dowd is maybe a bit obvious in his part as a progressive Catholic school teacher, but as always he picks up the humor and adds his own indelible touch to it. In fact so many enjoyable characters really throw into light the one that just doesn’t work, which is Naomi Watts’ Daka. Whether or not making her Russian was deliberate in order to make her dimwittedness seem more excusable, or worse, a cheap joke poking fun at Russian accents, Daka stands out like a sore thumb as unoriginal and unfunny. I’d prefer not to blame Watts, and instead blame Melfi, but she owns the role and plays it up. It’s certainly part of why St. Vincent isn’t spotless.

Because the script is based on many of his own personal experiences and people he’s known, it seems harsh to pinpoint Melfi’s plot holes (for one, he successfully uses a health setback to throw off the story, but then makes too light of the reality of recovering from such an ordeal), but they do exist. Terrence Howard has a small but substantial role as a loan shark lackey trying to collect from Vincent, but there’s no clear resolution on his story thread. Vincent’s inevitable super-grump moment seems a little out of step in the film’s storyline. Some sharper editing might have helped there.

All in all, St. Vincent is everything you do expect, and a few things you don’t. Murray does this particular role quite well (why else would he have done two Garfield movies if a grumpy cat wasn’t relatable to him?) and he pushes the film beyond the obvious. The emotional climax isn’t as hard-hitting as it could be, but audiences will enjoy St. Vincent for its humor and performances, not for any depth Melfi may have been hopeful to convey. And to be honest, who needs another sappy tale of late-life redemption? I’d rather watch Murray be crotchety from beginning to end.

It’s been 15 years since Theodore Melfi last made a feature film, Winding Roads. While that movie featured a young pre-Party Down/Parks & Recreation Adam Scott, his newest endeavor St. Vincent has a bevy of notable actors lead by its star Bill Murray, and continuing through Melissa McCarthy, Naomi Watts and others. As the film begins its rollout in the United States, Melfi has been festival hopping, most recently stopping by the Opening Night of the Philadelphia Film Festival. On the red carpet, he spoke with WayTooIndie about what inspired the new project, the environment he likes to create on set, and calling Bill Murray’s 1-800 number.

Read the full interview below or watch part of it in the embedded video, also below.

Could you tell me about where the idea to write this film came from?

Eight years ago my oldest brother passed away and he left an eight-year-old daughter, and my wife & I adopted her. We moved her from Tennessee to Sherman Oaks, California, and we put her into a Catholic school, Notre Dame High School, and in her sophomore year, in her world religion class, she got a homework assignment to find a Catholic saint that inspired her and find someone in her real life that mimicked the qualities of that saint. She picked St. William of Rochester, the patron saint of adopted children, and she picked me. That’s the genesis of the story, whereby a young kid named Oliver chooses a drunk Bill Murray as a saint.

So inspired by real-life events?

Yeah, it’s a true story.

Did you write this with the idea being you would ultimately direct it as well?

Oh yeah. I was going to direct it from the beginning whether I had to do it 50 cents or a 100 million, it doesn’t matter I was going to do it no matter what.

You ended up getting Bill Murray in the movie. He’s a little notorious to track down, I was wondering what the process was like to getting him to star in the film?

That’s too long a story. That’s like 10 minutes long. But basically, I’ll tell you this, Bill Murray doesn’t have an agent or a manger, he has a 1-800 number. So you just call the 1-800 number and if he likes what you have to say he calls you back.

So you were one of the lucky call backs?

One of the lucky call backs, yeah.

What was it like to work with such him, being such an iconic star?

You know, Bill’s so spontaneous, so free, and so in the moment. You got to be prepared and ready for anything he’ll do, whatever he’ll do. It was truly inspirational working with him, one of the greatest actors in the world, of our time, so it was just awesome.

You also worked with a couple underrated funny women in Melissa McCarthy and Naomi Watts, what was the experience like of working with them?

Melissa and Naomi, again just like Bill, they’re the best actors in the world. So free, so ready to go, so dedicated, I don’t know it was just a dream come true to have Bill Murray and Melissa McCarthy in the same movie, and then you add Naomi Watts that’s even more [of a dream come true]. There’s Chris O’Down, and Terrence Howard, so it’s like having an all-star cast right off the bat. Everyone was kind of free, we had a good time.

Is that something important to you, to have an easy-going atmosphere on the set?

You know, stress is like death to comedy, so you can’t stress out. We had a lot of parties, a very free set. Very loose, very fun. It was hot in Brooklyn but we had a good time.

Did any movies in particular inspire this story aside from the true events?

My favorite movie of all time is It’s a Wonderful Life, where a guy who doesn’t think he has any value in his life learns he has lots to value. So that had a lot of meaning to me and the film Up. It’s one of my favorite movies, too. About a curmudgeonly guy who takes a boy scout under his wing. So those two movies.

BONUS CONTENT! Watch a brief interview with the child star of St. Vincent, Jaeden Lieberher: