Virtue and venom

The new film St. Vincent  gives a person a lot to think about.  Bill Murray plays a character that represents everybody.  There's nothing particularly endearing about Vincent, a person everyone calls Vin.  Vin is introduced in a bar drinking way too much.  He sees a prostitute once a week.  He bets at the local horse racing track during racing season to try to raise money for his debts.  His house is untidy, his furniture cheap, his habits sloven.  Nothing attracts us to this 65-year-old man living alone.  But he has a little bit of all of us in him.

We don't all drink - no - or have any of the other habits Vin has.  But we all have our quirks.  And like Vin, we are all comfortable with where we are in life.  We accept ourselves as we are even if no one else does.

Here's the thing about Vin.  He goes with the flow of life and does the best he can in whatever condition he finds himself.  We find out that his wife has been in a memory home because of Alzheimer's and he has been visiting her 3 times every week even when she stopped recognizing him. We see that he takes on helping raise a child even though he never had any of his own.  He teaches a 12-year-old boy how to survive in his blown-apart world that has divorced and angry parents who don't really know how to raise a child themselves.  He does things for the boy that everybody would do once in a while because he represents everybody.

We also find out that he didn't just get to be 65 without a history, and a glamorous history at that.  He fought in Vietnam and won a bronze star for valor.  He married a beautiful woman and lived with her until her disease set in.  Still he visited her and treated her royally on a regular basis.  Finally, he accepted his age and his station in life and carved out a niche for himself that he was comfortable with - as we all do and have done.

In a moving moment, the climax of the story, Vin is honored as a saint by the young boy he taught to accept life as it was.  Suddenly, everyone could see Vin for the good that he had in him.  Bravo, Bravo for the script-writer for producing a story that is the true story of all of us as human beings.  We are all a mixed bag of virtue and venom.  People love us and hate us, alternately, for who we are and what we do.  No one possesses a perfect track record if (s)he has lived for 40 years or more.  We all just hope we can be accepted for who we are - when we have moments of grandeur and moments of grunge.

Yes, yes, yes to St. Vincent, saint Everybody, because we are who we are living lives that are what they are (a significant expression used in the movie).  St. Vincent will probably not be the highest selling movie of the season, but it should be.  We can all use a nudge to see others for what they have to offer and to accept people as a total package with and without warts.  Kudos to St. Vincent for the best movie of the whole year.   It is truth in modern clothing!