Review of My Cousin Vinny (1992) by Paul Z — 18 Mar 2009

Even Andre Bazin and Jean-Luc Godard surely had films they found difficulty watching objectively. We all are attached to at least one certain movie that resonates with our childhoods, holidays, families and different circles of friends. My Cousin Vinny is at least one film that I watch in pure vegetation no matter how exorbitant my film snobbery gets over the years. I know a guy who seems to watch nothing but gangster and samurai movies, and tends to mingle with similar guys, but will always have a place in his heart for Bob Clark's A Christmas Story, just like so many others who cannot watch it without all the signifying perspective of all those Thanksgivings and Christmases. I cannot watch My Cousin Vinny without thinking of my parents, how we all love it when Joe Pesci refers to his defendants as "yutes," much to the bafflement of a courtroom full of small town Southerners who may have never before heard a Brooklyn accent, how Marisa Tomei's Oscar-winning scene on the bench as an expert witness automobile aficionado never seems to get old to us.

What does change over time is my view of Joe Pesci's performance. It doesn't weaken. Rather, it carries different associations now than it did when I was younger, before he had much such a huge impact on me playing Tommy in GoodFellas and Nicky in Casino. I had only known him as a relative comic actor playing the pushover in the Lethal Weapon series, a handful of other films that I doubt I could revisit with an eye impartial to my memories of being obsessed with them in grade school. I'd also seen Raging Bull when I was quite young, and it had a definite impact on me as well, and I got to see My Cousin Vinny in a much darker, much more dejected ambiance. Now, I enjoy Pesci's Vinny Gambini for a different reason, how it's a complement to Pesci's work with Scorsese in terms of the background of the actor's associations as we see him here.

There has been lots of dispute over the years as to whether or not Marisa Tomei deserved the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her work here. It is certainly an unlikely film to garner any Oscars, an unlikely role as well. There have been many actresses similar to her in presence like Gloria Grahame, who did powerhouse work before the Academy finally acknowledged her with an Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful, in which she has ten minutes of screen time at best and plays a role far from the ballpark of central characters. Marisa's career, however, seems to have worked in reverse. I think that here, as Mona Lisa Vito, she was acknowledged because she, having merely appeared on A Different World and a sparse amount of bit parts, stuns us not only with her staggering physical beauty but with her ability to steal each and every frame in which she appears, even from Pesci, the lead, who had recently won the same award she was to win, and essentially for stealing every scene of GoodFellas, a film with a powerful cast. This is all theoretical, and as I said, it's difficult for me to be objective with this movie.

Pesci's lead is in part a typecast, as an Italian-American Brooklynite who thinks a black knit shirt with a gold chain necklace under a black leather jacket is proper courtroom apparel. He might be right if he were a defendant in the Bronx, but the movie takes place in Alabama, and he's the defense attorney for his Italian-American Brooklynite cousin Ralph Macchio, and his Jewish friend Mitchell Whitfield, two innocent college students on their way to school, suddenly having found themselves charged with the murder of a convenience store clerk. The circumstantial evidence looks ruinous, but the worst thing they have going against them is Pesci's all-around absence of legal familiarity.

Even though this classic fish-out-of-water story is set in the South and has an early shot of a sign that says "Free Horse Manure," this is not really a hick bash. The judge, played by Fred Gwynne, Mr. Munster himself, prosecutor Lane Smith, Perry White to Dean Cain's Superman and the arresting officer Bruce McGill, D-Day to Belushi's Blutarski, are normal Southern men who aren't trying to hastily sandbag anybody by means of false charges and insufficient evidence, but after gunshots were heard, three different witnesses made a positive identification of the two suspects, fleeing the store in a conspicuous late-1960s Buick convertible. (Cue Marisa.).

The movie stores most of its best laughs for the extended climactic courtroom sequence, in which one witness after another forges together the prosecution case, and the guiltless youngsters look decidedly bound for the electric chair. Gwynne's surly functioning in his scenes scenes is outstanding. The defendants are for all intents and purposes a foil. Macchio and Whitfield sit at the defense table and look scared, and that's essentially that. Pesci and Tomei, on the other hand, have an ironic relationship that I liked. Neither one is played as a lunkhead, or a contrast to the other. They're very clever, in their own ways that the by-the- book Southern court isn't used to, but in the middle of a legal undertaking for which they are totally unschooled. Basically, it's a great culture clash movie, not only in the courtroom scenes but in Vinny and Mona's struggle to get any sleep or find a suit or get breakfast or duke it out with a classic barroom redneck for the money he owes them. And I think that's probably it's biggest charm.