TORONTO - The movie’s over. The audience has laughed, cried, recoiled in horror at the bad behavior on display. But Bill Murray isn’t finished. The titular star of “St. Vincent” - instantly a hallmark role of his career - creaks open the screen door to his character’s pitiful backyard, headphones attached to a (yes!) portable cassette player, and starts singing along to Bob Dylan’s “Shelter From the Storm.”
For the next five minutes, as the credits roll for this feel-good comedy about a feel-bad guy, Murray fools around with a garden hose and echoes the Dylan verse on the sound track. How “beauty walks the razor’s edge,” how “nothing really matters much, it’s doom alone that counts.”
He’s wearing droopy camo cargo shorts and poking around for a cigarette. And he’s sublime.
In “St. Vincent,” opening in select theaters today, Murray is Vincent de Van Nuys, a loner, a crank, a boozer, a gambler, a guy who pays a Russian stripper to come over to the house, and who reluctantly becomes babysitter to a kid - Jaeden Lieberher - who moves in next door. The blotto Brooklynite takes the boy to the track, to his favorite bar. Melissa McCarthy plays the overtaxed mom; Naomi Watts is the aforementioned pole dancer from Putin land. Chris O’Dowd and Terrence Howard also star.
It was Murray’s idea to use the Dylan tune in the movie. It was director Ted Melfi’s to shoot Murray, in character, singing along to the “Blood on the Tracks” classic as the credits roll.
“It’s a beautiful way to end the movie,” Murray says, camped in a hotel suite the day after “St. Vincent’s” gala premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. “That song has always puzzled me. It comes alive.”
Murray - the knucklehead god of “Meatballs,” “Caddyshack” and “Ghostbusters,” the smug weatherman living out the comic existential nightmare of “Groundhog Day,” the melancholy star adrift in Tokyo in “Lost in Translation,” Herman Blume in “Rushmore” - is a private cat, too. With borders.
Originally from Chicago and one of the first “Saturday Night Live” alums to launch a movie career, Murray, 64, is famous for not showing up for appointments - not just with the media, but with writers, actors, directors who want to work with him. He moved to Paris for a couple of years. He goes back to his home in Sullivan’s Island, S.C., near Charleston, and spends time with his sons (he has six - two from his first marriage, four from his second, which ended in divorce in 2008).
Murray’s performance in “St. Vincent” - in a part that may or may not have been offered first to Jack Nicholson, depending on whom you talk to - walks the line between the goofball comedies of Murray’s early filmography and the more sober, stretchy stuff he’s been trying out since 1984’s adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge.”
Two years ago, Murray even managed to pull off the thoughtful and affecting portrayal of FDR - immersed in an affair, stricken with polio, his nation on the brink of war - in “Hyde Park on Hudson.” He got a Golden Globe best actor nomination for it, and some folks thought he should have had an Oscar nomination, too.
In “St. Vincent,” Murray does funny, he does sad, and he does Bob Dylan. Give the guy a smoke.
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