Sometimes I add a film to my list and leave it there for so long that I forget why I did so by the time I get around to watching it. This is the case for My Cousin Vinny which doesn’t seem to be that significant a film. Interestingly this film is basically about New York Italians who are forced to stop and deal with the locals in a small Alabama and much of the humor is in the clash of these two very different worlds. Yet the director Jonathan Lynn is British, best known for the Yes Minister television series.
Two college boys are travelling through Alabama when they stop in a convenience store to pick up some groceries. One of them puts a can of tuna in a jacket pocket and forgets to pay for it. When they are pulled over by a pursuing police officer, they assume that they are being picked up for shoplifting and confess. After a series of comedic misunderstandings, they are horrified to learn that the store clerk was shot and killed so they are accused of murder. Realizing that they need a lawyer and not having the money to pay for one, they call on the cousin of one of the boys Vinny. Vinny duly arrives in town with his fiancée in tow but he turns out to be a relatively new lawyer with no trial experience and no knowledge of Alabama law. He also has difficulty adjusting to the local living conditions and immediately rubs the presiding judge the wrong way. In fact, the first day in court, Vinny himself is thrown into jail for contempt of court which does nothing to inspire confidence in the two young men he is supposed to be defending.
Going into this I was primed to expect some kind of light comedy and certainly silly gags like Vinny slipping on the mud because he has no experience of being in the countryside and not being to get a good night’s sleep because every hotels he checks into is noisy, falls into that rubric. But I mostly didn’t find it very funny because at the heart of it, it is still about two youths wrongfully accused of murder and facing execution if found guilty. That doesn’t feel like a laughing matter at all and Vinny’s behavior of needlessly antagonizing the judge and other officials seems petty and pointless. It’s one thing if Vinny genuinely behaves like a fish out of a water due to ignorance but antics like acting as if he doesn’t hear the judge or questioning whether the judge is being serious in a faux-innocent manner is hard to view charitably. He even acts like an asshole towards his fiancée Mona Lisa for no good reason when she is only trying to be supportive. It’s also too obvious an attempt to reduce audience expectations of what Vinny is capable so as to surprise you later.
When the trial proper finally starts, Vinny does blow everyone away with his aggressive questioning and methodical dismantling of the witnesses’ testimony. It turns out that despite his seeming insouciance, he has been paying attention, even knowing how long it takes to cook grits even though he has never seen it before arriving in Alabama, in order to call into doubt a witness memory of how long the boys were in the store. The film also features the use of expert witnesses and procedures to establish the competency of the witness. These details together with Vinny’s strategy are apparently all accurate enough for this film to be used as teaching material in law schools. Of course in the usual turnaround, Vinny also calls upon Mona Lisa’s help as an expert witness in her own right and that certainly makes for an impressive display of automotive knowledge.
Overall however I found this film to be only about okay. I dislike how they try to exaggerate Vinny’s negative qualities through most of the film in order to make him look better during the trial. Most of the jokes rooted in him feeling out of place in Alabama are unworthy low blows and it’s difficult to see why Mona Lisa keeps putting up with such a distasteful and short-tempered boyfriend. Finally I am amused that Ralph Macchio must have been a big name casting back then but he basically has nothing to do playing one of the two boys as the film isn’t about them at all. The courtroom scenes are indeed exciting but the whole process of building up to it is just faffing around.