My Cousin Vinny (1992)

We open in 1992, on a pair of New York college students wrongly arrested in rural Alabama and defended by a cousin who passed the bar on his sixth attempt. The comedy lives entirely in the collision of Brooklyn vowels and Alabama vowels. Race, remarkably, sits outside the frame; the friction here is regional, not racial, and the film has no interest in the latter. The filmmakers declined to cast a Black or Jewish actor as either defendant, wary of depicting the incarceration of either in the Deep South. The cast that resulted is overwhelmingly white and Italian-American, with a few Black performers in small supporting turns. So it goes.

Mona Lisa Vito, in the Oscar-winning performance that made Marisa Tomei, dismantles the prosecution with an encyclopedic command of rear suspensions and Positraction. She is the smartest person in the courtroom and the film knows it. Yet her expertise arrives as character comedy, a punchline about a woman from a family of mechanics, not a thesis about women in the professions. No feminist argument is advanced, and none is requested. The public defender with the severe stutter fares worse. His affliction is deployed as proof of incompetence, and Austin Pendleton spent the following decades regretting it. A disability used as a laugh line is not progress. It is the reverse.

What remains is procedure, and procedure the film gets right. Judges have written law review articles about Vinny's cross-examinations. Law schools screen it. The accuracy is technical, not moral, and the picture never stops to instruct us on how to live. There is no righteous anger at wealth, no environmental lament, no meditation on the body, no queering of anything. Two men are saved because someone knew the cooking time of grits. The cultural apparatus we now haul to such a film finds almost nothing to grip. We record this as a curiosity and move on.