My Cousin Vinny

My Cousin Vinny is laugh-out-loud funny, warmhearted, and so carefully constructed that it’s like a master class in storytelling.  My Cousin Vinny is a classic.

The film is a fish-out-of-water comedy in which newly-minted lawyer Vinny Gambini (Joe Pesci) and his fiancée Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei, in an Academy Award winning performance) travel to deepest Alabama to defend Vinny’s cousin in a murder trial.  The cousin (Ralph Maccio) and a friend had been road-tripping through the South on their way to college when a case of mistaken identity landed them in Jail, so it’s up to Vinny to save the day.

This movie could have gone wrong in so many ways.  It could have portrayed the locals as hicks or thugs or any number of offensive stereotypes one could pin on Southerners.  It could have turned Vinny into a crook or a goomba or any number of offensive stereotypes one could pin on New Yorkers.  Instead, it paints the Southerners as decent, honest professionals who are trying to do the right thing.  It paints the New Yorkers as decent (basically) honest hustlers who are trying to do the right thing.  In fact, there’s so much decency and honesty going around that this film has no villain (other than the real killers, who remain helpfully out of frame). 

This lack of a villain grants the film a certain bonhomie, a sense that everything’s going to be ok, even though we know the stakes are high.  This gives us room to laugh, and My Cousin Vinny capitalizes on that room to deliver one gag after another, each rooted in the characters and situation and not simply pulled from the ether.

The film also benefits from its near-perfect construction.  My Cousin Vinny doesn’t have a one wasted shot or line of dialogue.  Everything we see either lays the foundation for something to come later, tells us something about the characters, or sets up a laugh – often, all at the same time.  It’s one of those rare comedies that rewards repeat viewing, as it gives us the opportunity to enjoy seeing all the pieces move into place.

In short, I love this movie.  I see it every few years and, every few years, it delights me.  My most recent viewing was with my 14-year-old.  I’m pleased to report that it delights the next generation, as well.  Movies just don’t get much better than My Cousin Vinny.

PS  Shoutout to costume designer Carol Wood.  This was her last film, and the things she did with Marisa Tomei are simply magnificent.  Brava!

Real Steel

Real Steel.  It’s a fighting movie without any actual fighting.  Yes, enormous animated robots duke it out in various venues, but they’re just robots.  This could be a movie about slot car racing or flying model airplanes.

Here’s the deal: it’s the near future.  Hugh Jackman plays a derelict drifter, one whose sole possessions appear to be a semi truck, a rock ‘em sock ‘em robot, and a 6-pack of cheap beer.  Oh, and he must have a full gym and a nutritionist and a personal trainer and some actual motivation in there, too, because I’ve never heard of a derelict drifter in the kind of shape this guy’s in.  Anyway, he drives from town to town, putting his ‘bot in small-time bouts for chump change and making bets he can’t cover.  He’s bad at it.  Enter a long-lost son.  Time to grow up.  Time to make something of himself.  All that.  You’ve seen it before.

Look, Jackman’s a super-talented man, Dakota Goyo, who plays the son, is a super-talented boy, and it’s hard to screw up the “man-child grows up and bonds with his kid” storyline.  But that storyline is really just a framework for the film’s showcase battles between various androids, and I couldn’t bring myself to care about them.  Not because I didn’t care about Jackman père et fils, but because a fight in which the contestants neither tire nor feel pain is no fight at all.  I’m not holding myself out as an expert fighter, here – I’m basically going on memories of Plebe boxing at USNA.  But I remember how I felt after only three rounds, when it was all my opponent and I could do to keep our gloves up and lob feather-light jabs at one another.  Real Steel’s robots can’t know what that’s like, so I couldn’t care about them.  And since I couldn’t do that, well, the movie’s marquee moments fell flat.

I think Jackman and Goyo could have carried a movie about a down-on-his-luck boxer who needed someone to believe in him.  The very conceit of Real Steel, however, left me with no skin in the game.