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
