My Cousin Vinny 1992

[8.5/10] It’s a crime that My Cousin Vinny wasn’t so much as nominated for a Best Screenplay award at the 1993 Oscars. You’d be hard-pressed to find a script that accomplishes so much, so nimbly, and with so much character, with only a handful of “gimmes” to speak of. The film is a fun rendition of the legal system, and a showcase for an array of talented performers. But first and foremost, it is a well-built, tightly-written movie that owes much of its success to how well every piece of it works together.

That starts with humanizing the title character. If there’s an overarching theme to the film, it’s not to judge a book by its cover. Vinny LaGuardia Gambino and Mona Lisa Vito are practically cartoon characters. The comic premise of the film hinges on what it’s like to see a pair of stereotypical New Yorkers have to make due in a country-fried Alabama town. It would be easy to rest on your laurels there.

The movie has its fun with leather-clad Vinny lamenting lard-cooked breakfasts and pig runs next door while the fashionista Lisa doubts the quality of the local chinese food. Likewise, the District Attorney is a hunter who knows how to play the local system, and Judge Haller is the closest thing to the film’s antagonist, speaking with a thick drawl and giving a hard time to the outsider from the Big Apple invading his courthouse.

Yet, by the end, the judge blesses Vinny’s unorthodox style and, with a little greasing of the wheels, recognizes what the attorney accomplished. The D.A. plays (mostly) fair and earnestly congratulates Vinny for beating him in the courtroom. Lisa not only learns the Alabama criminal procedure that eludes her fiance, but proves, on the stand, that despite her well-manicured exterior, she’s an experienced and insightful gearhead whose knowledge of classic cars proves crucial to proving Vinny’s case. All of them present one way at first blush, and even after exaggerated interactions with one another, but show the audience layers and surprises by the time the credits roll.

The one who takes the cake, though, is of course VInny himself. The beleaguered personal injury lawyer, who failed the bar five times and has only been licensed for six weeks, seems in over his head. He tries to argue his case at the arraignment rather than simply offering his clients’ plea. He fails to conduct any cross-examination at the pre-trial hearing. He constantly irks the judge, tripping over decorum and procedure, getting himself and his clients on the adjudicator’s bad side almost immediately. Given the goombah-tinted, fish-out-of-water trappings of the piece, (replete with disorienting dutch angles for the more peculiar aspects of life in small town Alabama) it’d be easy to mistake My Cousin Vinny for a comedy of errors at first.

Yet, near the midpoint of the film, the family member Vinny’s striving valiantly to defend offers a telling recollection of Vinny poking holes in a magician’s act. It portends the same zeal and talent Vinny shows for poking holes in the prosecution’s case. What he lacks in technical knowledge of court protocols, he makes up for with a Sherlock Holmes-ian ability to catch witnesses in fibs or mistakes, that expose how the supposedly airtight case against his client is riddled with more pin pricks than anyone in this skeptical courtroom thought.

He’s a wizard with the substance of the case. One of the purest joys in cinema, and this film in particular, is watching someone talented do what they do best. Seeing him pull off a demonstration of an eyewitnesses sorry vision makes for a comic spectacle, but is also a triumph in him living up to the potential a kind New York judge saw in him years ago. This smart-mouthed, underqualified, cranky yankee turns out to be the magician his cousin and friend need.

More than that, he becomes someone the audience wants to root for. The film uses Vinny for all manner of fun comic hijinks. Whether it’s hoodwinking a local tough who refused to pay up his bet with Lisa, or sniping back and forth with the judge, or simply Joe Pesci’s incredible facial expressions, there’s a lot of broad but effective laughs to be had.

At the same time, though, in a vulnerable moment, Vinny tells his fiancee that he’s scared to screw this thing up. He tells the tale of how someone went out of their way to help him, and despite his struggles, wants to validate that kindness and trust in his abilities. The payoff to a series of gags about how Vinny is awoken at some ungodly hour each evening by some absurd late night disturbance is not some final comic escalation. Instead, it’s Vinny finally sleeping soundly at night because he had a great day at court. Despite being an outsized character, there’s just enough heart and humanity in Vinny to make him recognizable and even lovable. So much of that comes down to the simple fact that despite his bombast and bluster, the man cares.

The one knock against the film is that it doesn’t quite pull off the same for Lisa. The script at least frames her as a smart, self-possessed woman who genuinely wants to help and doesn’t necessarily get the respect she deserves. But her main motivation is that she wants to get married and have kids. That’s fine, except that it reduces her shtick with a reluctant Vinny into a bog standard, sitcom-y “Why won’t you marry me, jerk?” routine. There’s sweetness between the couple, but the chirping, sniping stereotypical element of their relationship is a drag, and Vinny physically forcing a recalcitrant Lisa into the courtroom is less than ideal. Throw in some prison rape jokes and laughs at the expense of a person who stutters, and there’s certainly parts of the film that haven’t aged well.

What helps cover for that is the sheer force of personality at play. Marissa Tomei doesn’t give a traditional awards bait performance as Lisa, but she’s memorable and distinctive in every scene, with a force of nature personality and physicality that makes the characters a pistol from the beginning. Fred Gwynne, meanwhile, is the film’s secret weapon. His take on the judge is a slightly more down-to-earth figure than the cantankerous yankees, but his quick-to-anger, faux-genteel, oft-befuddled bent makes him a formidable player and stealthily hilarious addition to the cast.

Of course, none of it would work without a fantastic performance from Joe Pesci. He’s still largely in the wiseguy mode he perfected in Goodfellas. But he owns every form of humor that My Cousin Vinny puts forth, a varied slate of comedy from all corners that keeps things light and hilarious. Exaggerated fisticuffs with a local tough, elaborately technical back and forths with Lisa, smaller scale disbelief at his interactions with the town and the judge are all nothing for Pesci to pull off with flying colors.

He’s just as good, however, at showing Vinny’s cleverness and his softer side, helping the audience see the analytical mind a supportive mentor spotted in traffic court, and the caring that made someone like Lisa gravitate toward him. It’s a hard bundle of character traits to harmonize and make believable, but a performer with the strength of Pesci more than manages.

The writers pull off the same magic trick. There’s so much attention to detail in this script, which makes each new wild development seem totally organic in hindsight. An ostensibly pointless conversation with a short-order cook about grits lays the foundation for him to undermine a witnesses’ testimony about what he supposedly saw in the time it took to make breakfast. A tossed off comment from the D.A. about the murder weapon being the only thing he’s missing to make this an open-and-shut case has an ironic echo when locating that weapon is the nail in the coffin for the prosecution. Even a dopey slapstick scene of Vinny and Lisa’s car getting stuck in the mud, with Vinny himself taking a pratfall in it after a failed attempt to drive his way out of it, becomes the inspiration he needs to figure out that the car his clients’ drove couldn’t be the one to make a set of incriminating tiremarks. This is an efficient, sound script that sets up everything it knocks down, so when the inevitable “Aha!” moment of victory for Vinny arrives, you believe it, because they earned it.

The screenplay also manages to provide plenty of stakes for that big moment to matter. The chances of this big comedy ending in an execution are slim, but the lives of Vinny’s nephew and friend are on the line, and the humanitarian protests and flickering lights at the prison mean the electric chair looms large. For somewhat contrived reasons, Lisa marrying her beau rests on him winning his first case, which adds extra pressure to the proceedings. And all the while, Vinny is trying to exonerate his clients before the ornery judge uses his connections to discover that Vinny is not, in fact, the famed and experienced jurist he claimed to be. For a fairly out there comedy, the writers make sure there’s a lot on the line as Vinny delivers his final rhetorical blow.

Still, what’s most at stake is something far more simple -- will Vinny succeed or not? Sure, he wants to save his cousin, pass his own test to marry his fiancee, and evade the scrutiny of the judge. At the end of the day, though, he most wants to prove himself, as a lawyer, a man, and someone who can vindicate the faith a kind stranger and his cousin showed in him. That’s why the triumph of his final unraveling of the prosecution’s case has so much oomph. Against all odds, Vinny showed the best part of himself that few people saw or even believed existed, and he deserves the win.

It’s the type of small scale, character story we don’t see much at the cinema anymore. The crack writing ensures there are laughs, setbacks, and payoffs to keep this thing fun and compelling the whole way through with little in the way of traditional movie tricks. There is no chosen one here. No weepy melodrama. No absurd, vaguely action-y set piece in a goofy comedy. Just the earned payoff of both plot and character coming together in one glorious crescendo. If that’s not worth awarding, I don’t know what is.