Today’s screenplay has been gaining a lot of heat lately since the attachment of Bill Murray. But is the main character too unlikable to save the sweet character piece?
Genre: Dramedy
Premise: When a struggling single mother and her oddball son move next door to an aging angry neighbor, the son and the neighbor form an unlikely friendship.
About: This script finished low on last year’s Black List, and has pretty much disappeared until recently when Bill Murray signed on to play the lead. The script will be directed by its writer, Theodore Melfi. Melfi has been around for awhile (with credits dating back to 1998), apparently doing most of his work on the indie scene and with short films, although nothing you’ve probably heard of.
Writer: Theodore Melfi
Details: 105 pages
Okay so, remember how Monday I said beware when writing these movies because nobody pays attention to them unless they’re amaaaaazing. Well, I think we have something that approaches that elite category here. Not quite sure it gets there, but it comes close. However, in order to bolster my original claim, I should point out that I have been avoiding this script like the plague. I’ve gone through last year’s Black List maybe a hundred times when looking for stuff to read. And whenever I came across this title and this logline, I thought, “Borrrriiiiing” and move on.
I want you to think about that for a second. This script was on the Black List. This script had already been vetted by the industry and considered good. But with the boring logline and religious-sounding title, I still wasn’t interested. And I’m betting that’s why a lot of other people hadn’t read it either. It wasn’t until Bill Murray became attached that anyone cared. So make sure when you’re coming up with your movie idea, that it’s one that makes people want to pick up your script and read it. And if it isn’t? If it’s a character piece? You have to be fine with the fact that you’re probably getting one-tenth the reads that you’d be getting with a snazzier logline. If you’re okay with that, then take a shot brother!
Speaking of brothers. Or fathers. Or whatever it is they call the people in churches who lead those boring sermons – I’m happy to report that this script is not religious. It covers saints, but there’s going to be no preachy-preachy going on here. St. Vincent is about a man in his late 60s, Vincent, who’s given up on life. He lives in his house that looks like it could be a candidate for a Hoarders season premiere, and spends most of his time bitching about how the world sucks to his only friend, a pregnant African American hooker named Charisse.
Now Vincent would stay in his Hoarder house all the time if he could, but he’s running out of money, so he’s forced to go out and beg banks for more time or try to win money at the dog races. Oh, and he’s not against getting totally shitfaced at the local watering hole and zig-zagging home in his car either.
This wondrous lifestyle is interrupted when Maggie and her adopted nerdy 12 year old son, Oliver, move next door. Vincent makes it known that he is not a fan of his new neighbors, but when Oliver gets locked out after school one day, Vincent allows him to stay at his house until his mom gets home. While Vincent would never admit to caring or liking anybody, there’s something interesting about this kid, and because he has bills up to the ceiling and is desperate for cash, he tells Maggie he’ll babysit Oliver every day after school. Maggie doesn’t love the idea, but since she’s struggling to make ends meet herself, she doesn’t have any other options.
Vincent introduces Oliver to his lifestyle, including the hookers, the gambling, and the drinking. Oliver doesn’t do any of this stuff, of course (except for gamble), but he’s there when Vincent does it. And it shows him a whole new world he never knew existed.
Back at school, where Oliver is predictably having a hard time fitting in, his first big classroom assignment is coming up with a presentation about a modern-day saint. I think you know where this is going. It’s pretty obvious. And yet the story twists and turns in these little unexpected ways to keep the journey interesting. St. Vincent is a story about friendship, about opening up, and about never being too old to give life a second shot. It’s pretty darn good!
First thing I noticed about this St. Vincent? It takes that big screenwriting risk of making its main character EXTREMELY unlikable. I mean Vincent is downright nasty. At one point, he swats a can of money out of a legless homeless man’s hands! Jesus Christ. That’s almost as bad as your hero shooting a dog in the first scene.
This decision always fascinates me because a big reason for disliking a lot of the scripts I read is that I don’t like the main character. He’s a jerk, an asshole, or just plain unlikable. Yet here Vincent is extremely unlikable, and yet I still want to follow him. I still want to see what happens next.
I think this has something to do with our desire to see bad people change into good people. We want to see them transform. But as far as why I hate some scripts because of unlikable protagonists and didn’t have that reaction this time around, I’m still not sure how that’s achieved. There were some “Save The Cat” moments later on (which I’ll talk about in the “What I Learned” section), but I’d formed my opinion before that. Even though Vincent was an asshole, I still wanted to go on this journey with him.
It also never ceases to amaze me how dependable the “running out of money” trope is in writing. I mean we see it in virtually EVERY movie as a motivation. Someone’s running out of money (in this case Vincent) and that’s what motivates the central plot element (babysitting Oliver). You’d think that something this cliché would turn people off, but maybe it’s so relatable that people just go with it. I don’t know but it certainly worked well as a motivation here.
Another interesting thing about St. Vincent is that there IS NO GOAL. For someone (me) who preaches the importance of character goals to drive your story, I’m always intrigued by screenplays that don’t adhere to this and still work. So why does the script work? Well, when you don’t have a goal driving your protagonists, you still want to have a high-stakes impending situation the characters are moving towards. This way, we’re still interested in reading on, because we want to see how that situation plays out.
In this case there are two. The first is that Oliver has to come up with a saint for his class presentation. This isn’t that big of a driving force because we all know who he’s going to pick. The other works better – Maggie’s custody hearing with her ex-husband. There’s a chance that her husband may take Oliver away. And that’s something we DEFINITELY feel the stakes for because we like Maggie and don’t want to see her lose her kid, and we come to like Vincent, and don’t want his and Oliver’s friendship to be broken up. So you can see while even though none of the characters are aggressively going after something here, there’s still an end point to their storylines looming, and that’s what keeps us reading.
Outside of the structure stuff, this script just had a lot of nice moments to it. It wore its heart on its sleeve but did so with just the right amount of pull. I loved the friendship that emerged between Oliver and the school bully. I loved when we found out why Vincent was so hardened and beaten down by life. I liked these little touching scenes like when Vincent and Oliver win the trifecta at the dog races together. I even warmed to the hooker character, who was the only character I wasn’t onboard with initially.
This is a textbook example of how to write a good character piece. Give characters interesting backstories that affect their present-day stories. Place characters who wouldn’t otherwise be together together and see what happens. Give each character their own flaw that’s holding them back, which they must overcome by the end of the script. And make sure to give us a satisfying ending that pays off all the effort we put into these characters. I see too many character-driven screenplays that end with a whimper. While it was a little stage-y, I liked Oliver giving his big “Saint” speech in front of the school. To quote Jesse Pinkman from Breakng Bad, “It was pretty moving, yo.”
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The “Late-arriving save-the-cat moment for an unlikable protagonist.” Here’s the thing, when you have a character who’s an asshole – when that’s his flaw – you need to establish that in the first 15 pages. You need to show him being an asshole so the audience knows that’s who he is. You can’t work in an artificial “save the cat” moment because screenwriting books tell you you have to. It’ll just confuse the audience. “Well he’s an asshole. But no wait he’s nice!” Which is it?? What I learned here is that after you’ve established a “bad” protagonist’s flaw, you can recoup the reader’s dislike for him afterwards by adding a “Late-arriving save-the-cat moment.” Melfi establishes this when Vin beats back the bullies attacking Oliver and with the arrival of Vincent’s wife, who we find is stuck at a home with Alzheimer’s. The way he cares about his wife, loves her, even pays the nurse to rotate her pillows in the freezer every hour because she loves cool pillows – this is what makes us fall in love with Vincent. This is what makes us root for him.
