My Cousin Vinny 12/29/12, Best Supporting Actress, 1992
It took me twenty years to watch this movie. Silly me. It uses the fish out of water premise by dropping two New York City friends into the South, Alabama actually, and having them charged with murder. Enter Cousin Vinny, played by Joe Pesci, a lawyer who has never tried a case and is terribly unfamiliar with trial procedure. Fred Gwynne (beloved Herman Munster) plays the judge who is offended by Vinny’s disregard or lack of knowledge of proper etiquette, which leads to some of the movie’s best exchanges. Vinny appears to be severely overmatched by the District Attorney and his own ineptitude, until he miraculously finds his inner Perry Mason and starts to turn things around. The one person who believes in him the whole way, and bails him out when necessary, is his fiancee Mona Lisa (Lisa)Vito, played by Marisa Tomei who won for Best Supporting Actress. Lisa wants very much to help Vinny, but he’s determined to do it all on his own, until he finally realizes she has found a key piece of evidence. That’s all I’m going to tell you because watching the story unfold was one of the best parts of the movie. There are so many fun threads that run through the movie: Vinny and Lisa’s challenge in finding a quiet place to sleep; the sparring between the Judge and Vinny; big city versus small southern town. As I write this, it occurs to me that the two ‘utes’ (one of whom is Ralph Macchio of Karate Kid fame) who started this whole thing are almost peripheral to Vinny’s storyline. I only saw two of the other films that were nominated with a Best Supporting actress, Howard’s End and Enchanted April, and I remember very little, except those films, and the others nominated, were very serious and somber. Perhaps that’s why Tomei’s performance stood out so much, because it wasn't overtly comical or slapstick and certainly not dour, but funny and endearing. She and Pesci had great chemistry, and her scene toward the end of the movie probably sealed the deal. There is quite a lot of swearing in the movie (don’t get me wrong, I swear all the time), but I think that’s why it got the ‘R’ instead of ‘PG-13’, but other than that, I think it’s more watchable than some of the nighttime television that we have these days. If you haven’t seen it in a while, it’s definitely worth watching again, and if you haven’t seen it at all, you should.
