MY COUSIN VINNY
With Joe Pesci, Marisa Tomei, Ralph Macchio, Mitchell Whitfield, Fred Gwynne, Lane Smith, and Austin Pendleton.
“Why is this film so popular?” Michael Sragow asked a little plaintively about My Cousin Vinny in the New Yorker last week. Then he suggested an answer: “Perhaps because it gives Pesci a chance to combine his commercial signature, pop scabrousness, with old-fashioned virtues like ‘heart.’” This hypothesis implies that audiences go to comedies for highly esoteric reasons–just like some film critics.
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Ever since malls and mall culture started to take over and define mainstream American consciousness, regionalism has become an increasingly scarce commodity–so much so that whenever it does turn up in movies it’s tinged with a certain nostalgia. I would wager that part of what’s appealing to many people about both these new comedies is that they’re steeped in the idiosyncrasies of specific locales, languages, and life-styles, all of which predate malls’ homogenized cultural anonymity. Moreover, both these comedies are structured around the juxtaposition and interaction of two distinct cultures within a single fixed, formal arena–a courtroom in My Cousin Vinny and various basketball courts in White Men Can’t Jump. Spiking the competition between cultures is the fact that the filmmakers refuse to declare one side good and the other evil. (Each movie has a specific moral scheme but doesn’t require any serious villains to illustrate its sense of wrong.) Though the story lines of both movies may be ragged, improbable, and unevenly motivated in spots–Vinny slips a meaningful note to the sheriff at the eleventh hour of My Cousin Vinny, and the hero’s girlfriend in White Men Can’t Jump gets on Jeopardy–they still seem to be unfolding within a reasonable facsimile of the real world.
While they’re clearly amused by the provincialism of both the south and Brooklyn, Launer and Lynn are charmed by these cultures’ old-fashioned virtues. But fortunately they aren’t so charmed that they idolize or patronize any of their characters: they’re equally deft on the bickering mating rituals of Vinny and Lisa and the blinkered self-congratulation of the white southern gentry. (When Lane Smith’s district attorney glibly explains in court how a legal term “comes down from England and all our . . . ancestors there,” there’s a brief cut to attentive jurors, two of whom are black.) Brooklyn and Alabama glitz and sleaze are made to seem a little quaint and silly at times, especially when the cultures collide headlong, but they’re never treated with a snobbish sense of superiority. It’s a good sign that the actors show some real appreciation of regional slang and accents; part of what makes both newcomer Tomei and old-timer Gwynne –as well as Pesci and Smith–so enjoyable here is what they casually manage to do with Brooklyn and southern speech.
With his third feature, Shelton fully and finally establishes what might be called his auteurist credentials. These include a special feeling for sports and southern jive–though oddly enough, while he has a substantial background in baseball and basketball, his skeletal biography in the press kit makes his tenure in the south seem rather limited. (He was born and raised in southern California, where he also attended college on a sports scholarship, though he was signed by the Baltimore Orioles after graduation and played on minor-league teams in Florida and Texas.) Still, the southern elements in Bull Durham, Blaze, and White Men Can’t Jump are unmistakable, and extend to more than just the settings and a flowery and overripe sense of speech. (Blaze isn’t concerned with sports–unless one places southern politics and/or burlesque shows in that category–but then again, because it stars Paul Newman, it’s more a Newman movie than a Shelton movie, much as The Color of Money is more Newman than Scorsese.) If it’s possible to hypothesize a southern filmmaker’s worldview, distinct from dialects and settings–a particular blend of communal interaction, oral culture, sweaty sex, macho peevishness, and romantic hyperbole–Shelton clearly has at least as much of it as King Vidor, a certifiable born Texan.
