Monthly Archives: January 2023

  • My Cousin Vinny

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jonathan Lynn (1992)

    Two student friends from New York, driving through Alabama, stop to buy provisions at a convenience store.  Bill Gambini (Ralph Macchio) accidentally shoplifts a tin of tuna.  Back on the road, he and Stan Rothenstein (Mitchell Whitfield) are pursued and pulled over by a police car, and arrested.  They’re surprised the tuna theft is such a big deal even though, as worried Stan had already warned Bill, ‘the laws are medieval down here’.  In custody, Bill admits to the local sheriff, Dean Farley (Bruce McGill), ‘it was a stupid thing to do’.  Bill doesn’t know that, moments after he and Stan left the store, the clerk (Kenny Jones) who served them was shot dead:  Sheriff Farley has got himself a confession to the killing without even trying.   Bill is charged with first-degree murder, his friend as an accessory, in a state where capital punishment is alive and very well.  The boys can’t afford the lawyer they badly need but when Bill, allowed a phone call, speaks to his mother, she reminds him there’s an attorney in the family.  Vincent La Guardia Gambini (Joe Pesci) – Bill’s cousin Vinny – makes the journey from Brooklyn to Alabama, accompanied by his girlfriend, Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei), to take on Bill and Stan’s defence.

    My Cousin Vinny is a true black comedy (something liable to be overlooked because it’s also usually a broad comedy).  A man has been violently killed.  A miscarriage of justice, leading to the death penalty, is on the cards.  But Jonathan Lynn and the scriptwriter, Dale Launer, give the situation consistently light-hearted treatment, and the cast delivers performances to match – though that doesn’t stop them finding truth in their characters, too.  The film was a box-office hit and plenty of critics liked it – ditto a good few lawyers, who praised the accuracy of Lynn and Launer’s description of courtroom procedure.  It’s hardly unusual for the makers of film dramas to brag about their background research and insist what they’ve put on screen is consequently, unarguably credible (a whopping non sequitur).  It’s refreshing to see such research undertaken for the purposes of comedy and without boasting:  no one’s going to claim that the conscientious prep makes things funny.

    This was one of four films to be released in 1992 in which Joe Pesci appeared.  This matched his 1990 total but Pesci was never again so productive.  Since announcing his retirement from acting in 1999 (to concentrate on a musical career), he’s been nearly as good as his word – just three screen appearances since the turn of the millennium.  Two were probably favours for friends:  a cameo in Robert de Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006); a much more extensive supporting role in The Irishman (2019), which Martin Scorsese had to work hard to persuade Pesci into doing.  (His involvement in the intervening Love Ranch (2010), a flop directed by Taylor Hackford, in which Pesci starred opposite Helen Mirren (Hackford’s wife) is harder to explain.)  My Cousin Vinny also stands out for giving Pesci a rare lead role.  Pushing fifty at the time, he was probably too old for the part as written, even allowing that the title character has recently passed his law exams at the sixth attempt (he’s never appeared at a trial, let alone won one).  Yet Pesci’s age helps to make Vinny’s appearance and dress sense all the funnier, and the odd couple pairing at the heart of the story all the more enjoyably odd.

    Vinny drives into the town of Wahzoo (an invented name) and emerges from his car wearing Ray-Bans, a well-worn black leather jacket and cowboy boots.  Out from the passenger side comes his girlfriend, in a short, tight black skirt, black tights and high heels:  Lisa’s already taking photos, on a little instant camera, of the foreign country in which she and Vinny have just arrived, and predicting the local Chinese food will be terrible.  ‘Boy, do you stick out,’ he tells her, in a thick Brooklyn accent.  When she tells Vinny he does too, he points out the cowboy boots.  ‘Oh yeah,’ Lisa, in her even thicker Brooklyn accent, says drily, ‘you blend ’.  Marisa Tomei’s perfect reading of that line is the first of many.  For those of us familiar with him only from his Scorsese roles, Joe Pesci manages admirably the shift from jabbering cross-talk to a style of performance more dependent on acutely timed delivery.  He plays well with a range of other actors, notably Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster), as the trial judge (the splendidly named Chamberlain Haller) and Lane Smith, as the district attorney.  But Tomei is star of the show.  However obvious a punchline (and it’s sometimes very obvious), her timing and tone are triumphantly inventive.  Lisa’s frequent exasperation and occasional fury with Vinny feel real.  Tomei is a witty physical comedienne:  sashaying Lisa is both a cartoon and beautifully individual.  She works as a hairdresser but her dad runs a garage and all her other male relatives are car mechanics.  Vinny eventually drags Lisa to the witness box, where her dazzling display of automotive expertise confounds the prosecution – she proves the getaway car driven by the store clerk’s killer couldn’t have been Bill and Stan’s.  (James Rebhorn, also excellent, is the professional expert witness who eventually bows to Lisa’s superior knowledge.)

    My Cousin Vinny was distributed by 20th Century Fox.  It’s doubtful that a mainstream comedy in which a British director, a California-raised scenarist and a collection of New Yorker characters deplore and thwart Deep South culture and judicial convention, could get made in Hollywood today.  Not so much because the death penalty, needless to say, remains in force in Alabama (which, according to Wikipedia, ‘has the highest per capita capital sentencing rate in the United States’) – more because political correctness now extends to not treating as a laughing matter the political incorrectness of illiberal America.  Jonathan Lynn and Dale Launer don’t, it should be said, make fun of African-American Alabamans – except for, and very gently, Mrs Riley (Pauline Meyers), an elderly and, as Vinny demonstrates in court, seriously myopic eyewitness to the aftermath of the store shooting. Vinny’s earlier, horrified reaction to hominy grits for breakfast is directed not at the Black cook (Lou Walker) preparing them but at the colossal dollops of lard in the frying pan.  That lard and the fleshy white faces (on red necks) of the more aggressive locals are virtually of one substance.  As for Black faces, there are a few on the jury.  Lynn cuts emphatically to one of them listening to the DA’s opening statement, as he explains that ‘verdict’ is a ‘word that came down from England and all our l’il ole ancestors’.

    Even if the film were made by a major studio now, at least two sequences wouldn’t make the final cut.  Hot on the heels of the first crossed-wires conversation between Bill and Sheriff Farley comes another misunderstanding.  Stan is terrified by the prospect of jail:  ‘You know what happens in these places …,’ he tells Bill, ‘sometimes there’s a big guy no one wants to tangle with who’ll protect you but you have to become his sex slave and do anything he wants’.  Vinny – not a big guy but imposingly leathered – arrives in their cell while Bill’s asleep and is soon telling an increasingly suspicious Stan, ‘I mean, it’s your ass, not mine.  I think you should be grateful – I think you should be on your fuckin’ knees’.   The pace and energy of this exchange, typical of the film, are terrific but it would surely be construed as unacceptably homophobic now, though its loss would be a loss.  The same can’t be said for a later courtroom address by the public defender that Stan (briefly) hires to represent him instead of Vinny.  The man has a terrible stammer.  Not even Austin Pendleton’s comic resource and sensitivity can redeem this bit.

    Jonathan Lynn had directed for cinema before and would do so again but My Cousin Vinny was the only one of his ten features (the most recent made in 2010) to succeed with both audiences and critics.  Lynn is probably still best known, in Britain anyway, as a writer – co-author, with Antony Jay, of the BBC’s highly-rated (but tedious) 1980s sitcoms Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.   Dale Launer had already written two hit comedies – Ruthless People (1986) and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) – but has only one post-1992 writing credit on IMDb.   I don’t know how much Lynn, who also has a Cambridge law degree, may have contributed to Launer’s screenplay but their collaboration here is so successful that it’s a pity they’ve not worked together since.  Because it always seems inevitable that things must finally work out happily for Vinny, Lisa, Bill and Seth, the trial scenes run the risk of going through the motions:  in the event, the dialogue and staging turn them into effective courtroom drama (which is amusing in itself).  Perhaps the film could be trimmed by a few minutes – Lynn sometimes dwells on comical reactions for too long – but it never flags.  I hadn’t seen My Cousin Vinny for over twenty years but it’s as much a treat as ever.  I’m not sure that I ever enjoy new films nowadays – especially new comedies – as much as I still enjoy this one.

    12 January 2023

  • Peter von Kant

    Old YorkerFilm review

    François Ozon (2022)

    An introductory caption acknowledges the source material but François Ozon has already used an image to make clear his inspiration.  The first thing we see, on a red screen, is a photograph of the upper part of a man’s face:  the eyes, behind spectacles, are unmistakably those of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  At the very end of the closing credits there’s another photo of Fassbinder, this time with Hanna Schygulla – who’s in the cast of Ozon’s film and also appeared, fifty years ago, in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), from which Peter von Kant is ‘freely adapted’.  Where Fassbinder’s Petra was a fashion designer, Ozon’s Peter is a film director.  In the burly person of Denis Ménochet, he bears more than a passing resemblance to Fassbinder (once he’d put on weight in the last years of his short life).  Ozon commemorates the prime mover of his drama in unusually explicit ways.

    The similarities and differences between Peter and Petra are very interesting – provided that you come to the former already interested in the work of Ozon or Fassbinder or both.  Each film comprises six characters – all are women in the Fassbinder, three are men in the Ozon:  the other two roles to transition are the protagonist’s live-in personal-assistant-cum-doormat and Petra/Peter’s heartless heart’s desire (the role played by Schygulla in the original).  Fassbinder’s cast was German and spoke German.  Except for Schygulla, Ozon’s cast is French and mostly speaks French.   (The French-German intersection also recalls the casting, themes and title of Ozon’s Frantz (2016).)  The location of the story hasn’t changed country, though it has changed city – from Bremen to Cologne.  Ozon’s film (85 minutes) is much shorter than Fassbinder’s (124 minutes) but its timeframe is longer:  in the course of the action, Peter’s latest inamorato, Amir (Khalil Ben Gharbia), becomes a movie star, thanks largely to the older man who’s obsessed with him.  The date is still 1972, which retains the non-conformist charge of the main character’s sexual history and evokes Fassbinder’s own.  Although the actor playing Amir is French, he’s evidently of North African ancestry, which brings to mind Fassbinder’s unhappy relationship with El Hedi ben Salem, the Moroccan who co-starred in Fear Eats the Soul (1974).

    The music that Peter puts on his record player includes the Walker Brothers’ ‘In My Room’, which also featured on the soundtrack of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.  Although ‘In My Room’ dates only from 1966, Peter describes it as a song ‘from my youth’ (a remark that evokes another lavishly regretful ballad:  Charles Aznavour’s ‘Yesterday When I Was Young’).  ‘In My Room’ was a thoroughly apt theme song for Petra von Kant all of whose ‘action’ took place inside the title character’s apartment.  Ozon likewise stays in Peter’s apartment for the most part though Peter can’t be conducting his film-making career entirely within these four walls.  Despite mention of an empty diary, he does more than make phone calls to launch Amir into the big time – so successfully that, within a few months, his protégé no longer needs Peter’s help, let alone the burden of his furious possessiveness.  There are also occasional exterior shots of the courtyard of Peter’s apartment building and, in the closing stages, sequences inside a taxi and on a Cologne street that involve Amir and Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani), Peter’s long-time leading lady and muse.  The opening up of the material (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant began life as a stage play) hardly detracts from one’s sense of Peter as almost physically trapped in his abuse of other people and himself, and in his obsessions.

    For a few minutes at the start, Peter von Kant threatens to be no more than high-end camp.  But once Ozon has completed his introduction of the film’s world of extraordinary appearances – the décor of Peter’s apartment (which surely owes something to Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory (2019), as well as to Fassbinder’s original), the characters’ faces and clothes:  all splendidly captured in Manuel Dacosse’s cinematography – the drama develops emotional momentum.   This is thanks chiefly to Denis Ménochet’s fearless portrait of the incandescently desperate, coke-sniffing Peter but the whole cast is strong.  Aminthe Audiard is gently affecting as Peter’s teenage daughter, Gabriele.  The implacable beauty of both Isabelle Adjani and Khalil Ben Gharbia gives Sidonie and Amir an almost sinister power – a licence to be licentious.  Sidonie brings Amir into Peter’s life.  Once Amir escapes Peter’s clutches, she enjoys the young man herself – and he her (although Amir is finally a more ambivalent figure than his counterpart in Petra von Kant’s story).  Flawed, needy Peter, for all that he has made them in cinema, can’t hope to control the likes of Amir and Sidonie off-set.

    His comically skinny, staring-eyed vassal Karl (Stéfan Crépon), who might seem even needier than Peter, proves to be a worm that turns memorably.   When his tantrums and demands have driven the rest of his inner circle away, Peter decides to be nice to Karl:  the servant lets his master hold him close before spitting in his face and making his own exit.  Hanna Schygulla, once Petra’s love object-tormentor, is now Peter’s mother, Rosemarie.  Schygulla’s presence in Ozon’s film, by supplying a bridge back to Fassbinder’s, enriches Peter von Kant throughout, never more so than when Rosemarie, at the end of his doomed birthday party, sings to her physically and emotionally prostrate son a German lullaby.

    To return to the proviso at the start of this note’s second paragraph …   The commercial appeal of Peter von Kant is limited, to the say the least.  There may only be six people on the screen but that’s twice as many as were at the Curzon Richmond screening I went to (the figure of three includes me).   Although I found it more involving than the film that inspired it, I kept wondering, as I watched, about what François Ozon had and hadn’t changed, and whether the much shorter running time of Peter von Kant was a virtual acknowledgement on his part that this is a cinéaste exercise (albeit that Ozon’s characteristic wit ensures it’s never drily academic).  I’m still in two minds about this but impressed that the film’s meanings seem to have expanded in the fortnight since I saw it.  It now feels less a remake than an oblique, imaginative part-biopic of Fassbinder.  Peter von Kant is also a subtle but trenchant illustration of the huge changes in the presentation and cultural reception of same-sex desire that have occurred in the last half-century:  plenty of what these 1970s people say and do still startles.  When Hanna Schygulla sings that lullaby, her voice, in beautifying the moment, also suggests François Ozon’s own admiring affection for Rainer Werner Fassbinder – the gratitude of a present-day gay film-maker to a queer pioneer in cinema.

    4 January 2023

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