The defence jests

Ticket Stubs #8: In which Marisa Tomei is the greatest expert witness in US legal history.

Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare. This is Ticket Stubs #8.

My Cousin Vinny

Jonathan Lynn, 1992

My Cousin Vinny is a movie that defeats criticism, not with star power (though there are some sparklers here) or a remorseless marketing campaign, but by the sweet, cosy embrace of its comedy.

If that sounds like damning with the faintest praise, remember that the most enduring comedy is often the most endearing. Every now and then, we need disruption — innovation or provocation — but more often than not when we seek out a comedy, we want something familiar rather than challenging.

The movie is familiar because it is a retread of screwball comedies of the Forties with touches of the domestic comedies of the Fifties. Tonally, it’s very Nineties and therefore coarser and more cynical, but this is all surface-level. This is a movie that sets out to do nothing deeper than serve up laugh after laugh, and in that it succeeds. Between them, screenwriter Dale Launer and director Jonathan Lynn know how to craft broad comedy and sell it with visual elan. You need to have a pretty big stick up your butt not to chuckle once or twice, at the very least.

The Vinny of the title is Vincent Gambino, a mouthy Brooklyn ambulance-chaser played flawlessly by Joe Pesci. His cousin Bill (Ralph Macchio) and Bill’s buddy Stan (Mitchell Whitfield) are on a pre-college road trip through the Deep South when they pull into the Sac-o-Suds convenience store in (fictional) Beechum County, Alabama. While loading up on junk food, Bill accidentally shoplifts a can of tuna but before they can go back to pay, the pair are pulled over by a shotgun-wielding sheriff’s deputy and taken to the station for an intense interrogation.

They sure are tough on shoplifters in Alabama, or at least that’s what the boys figure. As will eventually be explained to them, after one of the movie’s best comedy-of-errors sequences, the store clerk has been found shot dead and they are being booked for his murder. Facing Yellow Mama, the boys need an attorney fast, when Bill remembers they have a lawyer in the family: his cousin Vinny.

Vinny, it turns out, is no Johnnie Cochran. He rolls into town with his girlfriend Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) and her squawky Brooklyn vowels. Vinny quickly clashes with judge Chamberlain Haller (Fred Gwynne), a southern martinet who won’t have no damn Yankee cutting wise in his courtroom, son. Much of the movie’s humour derives from these scenes of Pesci and Gwynne getting on each others’ nerves, though Pesci and Tomei’s bickering is lots of fun.

There isn’t much else going on in the film other than the trial but its set-pieces are enough to make up for the sparsity of the script. Whether cross-examining a short-sighted eye witness or turning grits from southern culinary staple into evidence for the defence, Vinny makes the courtroom his stand-up stage and his routine just zings, zings, zings. And in those moments when the gags are just a little too facile, the movie is so damn charming that you forgive it instantly. Even when My Cousin Vinny doesn’t make you laugh, it makes you like it.

The movie has outlived the thinner threads of its material thanks to Joe Pesci’s irresistible performance. My Cousin Vinny never decides whether it’s a one-man show or an ensemble piece and so it is a little of both. Pesci summons a Brooklyn wise guy who fell into law as a way to get paid for arguing. (Joe Bob Briggs says ‘ninety per cent of guys named Vinny in the world live in Staten Island’. The other ten per cent are Vincent Gambino.) This is a career comedy best for Pesci, who outdoes even his performance in Home Alone. Marisa Tomei is a riot and her surly take-down of an FBI expert witness is one of the stand-out scenes of her career.

My Cousin Vinny is unusual among legal movies in being highly regarded by the profession for its broadly realistic depiction of criminal trials procedure. In Novato Healthcare Center v. NLRB, Merrick Garland, then chief judge on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, described the movie as ‘a master class in cross-examination’. Former federal appellate judge Richard Posner called it ‘particularly rich in practice tips’ on how trial attorneys can handle hostile judges, voir dire witnesses, challenge expert testimony and use props and other visual displays to win over a jury. It was late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s favourite legal flick and he even raised the plot during oral argument in United States v. Gonzalez-Lopez, a real-life case about a defendant’s right to appoint an attorney, however unconventional, of his choice.

My Cousin Vinny is a comedy time capsule. The movie is mildly snobbish about the Deep South but never disdainful, gently liberal in its outlook but never preachy. Its comedy is distinctly Nineties, free from the fussy, prescriptive tone of contemporary anti-entertainment. The jokes earn your laughter by being funny, not by scolding and signalling. Revisiting the film is like catching up with an old friend you knew in happier, cooler, more care-free times.

Streaming now on Amazon Prime Video, Sky Store, Google Play, Disney Plus, and Apple TV.

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