Murray and Watts on St. Vincent de Van Nuys Set

You can hardly judge how a finished film will be from a single still frame, but the first-time director Ted Melfi appears to have gotten one scene in St. Vincent de Van Nuys exactly right. Shooting in Brooklyn on a recent Tuesday, he put Bill Murray—joined, in other moments, by co-stars Melissa McCarthy and Naomi Watts—in this beat-to-hell ’83 Chrysler LeBaron, complete with spiderweb windshield cracks. (Murray plays the crabby mentor to the child of Watts’s Russian prostitute.) It’s as if the poignantly aging character from Broken Flowers had gone broke and washed up by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. We’ll see if the rest of the film looks this good in 2014.