Review: “My Cousin Vinny” (1992)
The 1992 comedy My Cousin Vinny is a modern classic that has been seen and enjoyed by millions. We meet our main character, the woefully under-skilled New York City lawyer Vinny Gambini, when his nephew and a friend — Bill and Stan — are wrongly accused of robbery and murder in rural Alabama. In a stroke of über-bad luck, Bill and Stan have left a backroads pack-a-sack only to have two men in a car just like theirs to arrive right after them, rob the store, and kill the clerk. By mainstream American standards, this is a nightmare scenario: to be credibly accused of a crime you did not commit in the rural South and to face charges in a local court of harming someone who everyone there knows. Even worse for the accused — and for their lawyer and his sassy girlfriend Mona Lisa — they are the epitome of what Southerners are assumed to despise. These are Northerners through and through, three Italian and one Jewish, and are regarded by the locals as fast-talking outsiders trying to outdo the local justice system.
It must be acknowledged about mainstream American comedy films that they are not documentaries, nor does the format owe much to truth. Their purpose is to be funny, and in doing that, many stories rely on a certain amount of stereotyping, exaggeration, and other inaccuracies. My Cousin Vinny is no different in that regard, and the film should also be given props for its balance. The characters Vinny and Mona Lisa are just as heavily reliant on stereotypes of Italian-descended New Yorkers as the Alabama characters are on stereotypes of rural Southerners. The conflict and the humor in the film are built upon the idea of a culture clash. Instead of country-come-to-town, we have town-come-to-country. We laugh at Vinny Gambini going deer hunting in a black leather jacket and metal-tipped cowboy boots just like we laugh at the simpletons and dullards who populate the small town.
It is these somewhat-accurate distortions, including character types who evolve out of Southern myths, that provide the basis for the story. We have a sheriff with an overly simplistic sense of justice, and witnesses who attest to things they didn’t actually see. The young Jewish man Stan, who accidentally took a can of tuna from the little store, wonders out loud in all seriousness whether the State of Alabama puts people to death for shoplifting. Why? Because he — and perhaps some viewers — think that’s an actual possibility. (After all, over in Mississippi, the Chicago native Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered for whistling at a local white woman.) In court, then, we have the easygoing, charming Southern lawyer who prosecutes the case while smirking at Vinny’s rookie errors, and the quasi-majestic Southern judge who demands the most conservative standards of decorum but who also isn’t as dominant as he considers himself to be. Outside of the courtroom, in the various locations where Vinny and Mona Lisa try to eat and sleep, there is a whole array of slow-witted, small-town simpletons who are baffled by these strange visitors. A small diner is run by a lone black man who has to explain what grits are, and the hotel’s front desk man is unfazed by the early morning train. These are the circumstances that Vinny must navigate, with Mona Lisa’s help, to save two innocent young men from the electric chair. If it were left up to the legal system of Alabama, the wrong men would die, and that would be that.
While much of this is handled in a good-natured way, poking fun at the clash of cultures, the death-penalty aspect is built on a belief that Southerners are capable of terrible things. Bill and Stan are held during their trial in the maximum security prison that houses death row, and they are reminded regularly that they may end up there. Having them there is an allusion to a tactic used by Southern law enforcement against the Freedom Riders. That tactic was also used on others like Walter McMillan, a Alabama death-row exoneree whose story was featured in Just Mercy. True to life as the scenario may be, the decision by the filmmakers to have some of the guards cracking jokes about executions is in poor taste. One guard even remarks casually that they botched the last execution and had to try three times to get it right. Though it might fit well into some beliefs or narratives about Alabama, those attempts at wit are not funny.
Though My Cousin Vinny does not create new narratives about Alabama in specific or the South in general, it does reify existing narratives. The assumption among Bill, Stan, Vinny, and Mona Lisa is the same assumption expressed by Lewis in 1972’s Deliverance after he kills the two rapists: there’s no possibility of justice when an outsider kills a local. It is also presented as a heroic and righteous outcome when an argumentative car mechanic-turned-lawyer who failed the bar exam five times outsmarts an experienced Southern judge by falsifying his resume, practicing law without a license, and winning the case. The assumption is that Vinny must resort to corruption to hold his own in a corrupt system. Certainly, we know that no innocent young men should ever be convicted or executed, but their freedom was really obtained through Mona Lisa’s uncommon level of knowledge about “positraction,” not through Vinny’s chicanery. In the end, the movie tells us to be glad that this streetwise smooth operator drives off with a pretty girl in a convertible while the conservative old Southern judge grimaces at being outdone. Vinny didn’t just win the case, he came down and beat the South at its own game on its own turf.
Originally published at http://modernsouthernfolklore.com on May 30, 2024.
