Classic 90s Movie: “My Cousin Vinny”
May is Classic 90s Movie month. Today’s guest post comes from John Henderson.
Movie Title: My Cousin Vinny
Year: 1992
Writer: Dale Launer
Lead Actors: Joe Pesci, Marisa Tomei, Ralph Macchio, Fred Gwynne
Director: Jonathan Lynn
IMDB Plot Summary: Two New Yorkers are accused of murder in rural Alabama while on their way back to college, and one of their cousins — an inexperienced, loudmouth lawyer not accustomed to Southern rules and manners — comes in to defend them.
Why I Think This Is A Classic 90s Movie: Joe Pesci, who had recently won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for “GoodFellas”, brings his foul-mouthed, temperamental persona to a fish-out-of-water courtroom comedy in the Deep South. That alone makes a great starting point but “My Cousin Vinny” has more than just a solid, simple premise. It has a fantastic script by Dale Launer (“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”) that never condescends to the audience. It was directed by Jonathan Lynn, who directed “Clue” and holds a degree in law from Cambridge University. The movie also features great, familiar character actors such as Fred Gwynne, Lane Smith, Bruce McGill, the recently-passed James Rebhorn, and made a star of Marisa Tomei who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for this movie, appropriately as she steals every scene she’s in. Pesci plays Vinny with the right amount of confident swagger and genuine sense of concern over his being successful in this trial. Not only is his fledgling career as a lawyer on the line but so are the lives of his cousin and friend. It’s these moments of worry and self-doubt that make us want to cheer Vinny when he slowly but surely starts succeeding in the final courtroom showdown.
Twenty-two years later, “My Cousin Vinny” still holds up because Launer’s script actually takes the time to set up the characters and the situation first so we, the audience, know and care enough about what’s going on in order to go along with Vinny on this journey.
My Favorite Moment In The Movie: Early in the movie, following Vinny’s embarrassing first day in the courtroom, his cousin Bill (Ralph Macchio) and friend Stan (Mitchell Whitfield) express justifiable concern over Vinny handling their case. Vinny, desperate to prove he can do it, tells them the following:
Vinny: Look, maybe I could have handled the preliminary a little better, okay? I admit it. But what’s most important is winning the case. I could do it. I really could. Let me tell you how, okay? The D.A.’s got to build a case. Building a case is like building a house. Each piece of evidence is just another building block. He wants to make a brick bunker of a building. He wants to use serious, solid-looking bricks, like, like these, right?
[puts his hand on the wall]
Bill: Right.
Vinny: Let me show you something.
[he holds up a playing card, with the face toward Billy]
Vinny: He’s going to show you the bricks. He’ll show you they got straight sides. He’ll show you how they got the right shape. He’ll show them to you in a very special way, so that they appear to have everything a brick should have. But there’s one thing he’s not gonna show you.
[turns the card, so that its edge is toward Billy]
Vinny: When you look at the bricks from the right angle, they’re as thin as this playing card. His whole case is an illusion, a magic trick. It has to be an illusion, ’cause you’re innocent. Nobody — I mean nobody — pulls the wool over the eyes of a Gambini, especially this one. Give me a chance, one chance. Let me question the first witness. If after that point, you don’t think that I’m the best man for the job, fire me then and there. I’ll leave quietly, no grudges. All I ask is for that one chance. I think you should give it to me.
There are no jokes in this scene. It’s played straight and, as a result, establishes Vinny not as some flashy wannabe attorney but as a serious-as-hell person willing to go all the way to help these two kids. With that foundation laid, we can move on to the meat and potatoes of the movie, the trial.
My Favorite Dialogue In the Movie: Too many to mention as this movie is full of great lines but this exchange always makes me laugh. Many of the jokes in the movie serve two purposes. For example, early on, Vinny questions a greasy spoon cook about what a “grit” is. On one hand, this is just a joke showing Vinny’s ignorance of the local culture. However, later, Vinny uses the information he learned about making grits in the cross examination scene below:
Vinny: How could it take you five minutes to cook your grits when it takes the entire grit-eating world 20 minutes?
Mr. Tipton: I don’t know. I’m a fast cook, I guess.
Vinny: [across beside the jury] What? I’m sorry I was over there. Did you just say you were a fast cook? Are we to believe that boiling water soaks into a grit faster in your kitchen than any place on the face of the earth?
Mr. Tipton: I don’t know.
Vinny Gambini: Perhaps the laws of physics cease to exist on your stove. Were these magic grits? Did you buy them from the same guy who sold Jack his beanstalk beans?
Key Things You Should Look For When Watching This Movie
Two things always stand out to me when watching this movie. One, there is no villain. The judge, the sheriff, and the prosecuting attorney, while definitely making Vinny’s job harder, are professionals simply doing their jobs. They are not mustache-twirling bad guys out to prevent Vinny from solving the mystery. In fact, at the end, they each show Vinny respect for doing his job. If there is an antagonist, it’s the wheels of justice merely working against Vinny. The villains of the movie, the actual killers, are never even shown on screen.
Two, the law presented in the movie (for the most part) is correct. The cross-examination scenes do not contain the usual yelling and badgering that frequents law movies. Vinny does what any good lawyer does: he pokes holes in the witnesses’ stories, slowly allowing the truth to come out. Another aspect of the law used properly in this movie is the use of “voir dire”, a preliminary examination of proposed witnesses or jurors used to establish his/her competency. In “My Cousin Vinny”, this is used in the scene where Vinny calls his girlfriend, Marisa Tomei’s Mona Lisa Vito, to the stand to be an expert witness on automobiles. The prosecutor initially objects and requests to “voir dire” her to see if she’s qualified. It results in one of the movie’s most memorable scenes.
Thanks, Michael! To show our gratitude for your guest post, here’s a dash of creative juju for you. Whoosh!
We already have a set of 80s Movies. This month we cover 90s movies. So thanks to all of you for your participation in this project, creating a resource for writers, movies they should watch to help learn the craft of screenwriting!
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