There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practised [sic].
—Ralph Waldo Emerson,
from his essay “Experience” (~1844)
Subsections below:
A comedy of manners will be a vehicle for considering social reconciliation
Parsing a technical phrase helps show the angle of “our respective special expertise”
The manners humor is exemplified by Tomei’s impatient young hopeful-cum-“automotive savant”
Pesci as the puckish heart of the film
Precision when it counts
This film, which deceptively seems unambitious and simply made, takes us along as two New York area college students travel by car on their way to Florida (to look at potential new schools?). They are pulled over by an Alabama
Before they know it, the two young men (the other is Stan Rothenstein, played by Mitchell Whitfield) are prime suspects in a murder case, about to be arraigned in preparation for a trial, and are in panicky need of help. The most affordable choice for a defense attorney is a relative from New York, Vincent LaGuardia Gambini (Bill’s “cousin Vinny”), who only recently got admitted to the bar (his practice has been limited to personal injury, and its duration is “almost six weeks”) and has no experience yet in the courtroom. It took him six years, and six tries, to pass the bar exam.
We thus begin a story involving almost slapstick-style mistaken understandings (not exactly a “comedy of errors”), culture clash (unreconstructed New Yorkers among suspicious Deep Southerners), and needing to handle a legal process well in a type of case that, for any part of the U.S., would be serious business indeed, and in the hands of the Southerners, so the film implies, it could be an occasion for bending the rules a bit to teach random Yankees a lesson. As Vinny retorts at one private point to Stan, “You’re in Ala-f**king-bama. You come from New York
This film may seem like a lark, but it is surprisingly well made for what a slight thing it seems to be. The use of the camera (for angles, or creating a sense of momentum) is just one thing that shows a capable director is at work (Jonathan Lynn, a British actor and director, born 1943). And the script, by comedy screenwriter Dale Launer (born 1952), is smart enough to show familiarity with technical issues surrounding auto maintenance and, more importantly, various fine points of the law. In fact, according to the film’s Wikipedia page, among other distinctions of the film within the legal community, “Lawyers have praised the comedy’s realistic depiction of courtroom procedure and strategy,” and in 2008 the ABA Journal ranked the film number 3 among its “25 Greatest Legal Movies.”
The trial itself, the highlight of the film, is both entertaining and, for me, a useful way to understand issues of the fallibility of eyewitness testimony and the concept of reasonable doubt (on the latter of which the film Twelve Angry Men [1957] is also a good teaching tool about law for laypeople). (By the way, I am not a lawyer. Here’s proof, an old joke: Q: “What do you call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?” A: “A good start.”)
A comedy of manners will be a vehicle for considering social reconciliation
To a good extent, this is a comedy of manners, because a lot of the laughs come from cousin Vinny (played by Joe Pesci, who has appeared in Raging Bull [1980], Goodfellas [1990], and Home Alone [1990], among others) and his girlfriend Mona Lisa Vito, played by Marisa Tomei (she won a Best Actress Oscar for her work). They play their parts like deceptively stupid-seeming New York area Italians, complete with a flashy wardrobe that might tend to make one stand out even in a Mardi Gras parade and probably is roughly equivalent to the same cultural badges as the duds and other surface features of the Jersey Shore cast of recent years. You have to see this film to enjoy it, and you know that the “echt city-Italian” style is played quite generously for good-natured laughs by Pesci and Tomei (though Tomei did not reprise her role in other works, as Pesci apparently did, according to the film’s Wikipedia page).
When Vinny appears in the Alabama town, his early-1960s, mud-splashed Cadillac looms cumbersomely into view, the film soundtrack graced (as if to indicate Vinny’s car-stereo feast) with the kind of late-1980s dance music perfect for those so inclined to tear it up on the dance floor, and hence we know that in some special sense we are in good hands.
The overall theme of the film, when looked at seriously, relates to a couple edifying things. One is the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s theme of the patch that he used in speeches from around 1988 when he ran for president for the second time (this theme came from a story of his grandmother’s, I think). In terms of being able to contribute to the social welfare, each person, he said, from a different special-interest group has a patch. But to each, one can say, “Your patch is not big enough” to address the larger aggregate of concerns people in society have. But put the patches together, then the resulting quilt is big enough.
But also, court as a means to adjudicate disputes allows those of radically different backgrounds and languages to find common space and intelligible means of negotiating to resolve social problems. (Not that all art need serve a social purpose, but let’s remember how much worthwhile occasion there is to learn something from this otherwise fun film. And if such education isn’t your bag, there is always the new Twilight release…)
Parsing a technical phrase helps show the angle of “our respective special expertise”
Mona Lisa—before she became a hairdresser, who says she is unemployed in the film—and Vinny—before he became an attorney—were auto mechanics. Good ones, apparently, as it seemed to be a family tradition for every one of their family members (from their Brooklyn origin) to make a living in highly adept auto repair if he or she was able. (Her family seems to have more talented auto-servicers per square mile than Cuba.)
Mona Lisa, or Lisa for short, makes a reference to various technical terms and concepts—when she and Vinny have a mild spat about a faucet in their motel room that is dripping, and had she turned it off tightly enough? This whole sequence is notable for the kind of techno-talk and crudely colorful language that get intermixed in this film, as well as (in rarer instances) a muted or incipient sexual tension; and it also foreshadows the way Vinny tries to elicit help out of Lisa during the trial as a key expert witness, when she is still in a huff after they had a fight. (By the way, the fact that Vinny and Lisa, echoing the actors’ respective ages—about early forties and early-to-mid twenties—seem a little far apart in age to be a likely couple doesn’t really strike you—until it does.)
Had Lisa turned the faucet handle enough? She twisted it just right, she contends. Was she sure? She starts banter with an elaborate fantastical element: This particular faucet needed 10 to 16 foot-pounds of torque. How could she be sure? She used a Craftsman ___ [I didn’t get the model number] torque wrench…[with something relevant to] maximum allowable torquage [sic]…“the kind used by Cal Tech high-energy physicists and NASA engineers.” How, Vinny asks like a playful pedagogue, could she be sure [of the wrench’s capacity]…? She: Just before she used it, the wrench was calibrated by “top members of the federal and state Department[s] of Weights and Measures” to be—here comes a key spec—“dead on balls accurate.” When Vinny questions this, she maintains it’s an industry term.
In that phrase, I left out hyphens because I want to illustrate the film’s theme by showing how I bring my own “patch” to the multicultural-bridging question. A copy editor deals with this sort of thing—where to put the hyphen when it is needed? And how many hyphens are needed here?—and the copy editor doesn’t always have a sure source of authority on the matter. No grammar book may be at hand.
More relevantly, a particular job may follow the company at hand’s own house rules. And when rules are not perfectly specified for every issue that comes up, we editors rely on our experience and an abiding “general sense of good grammar” to follow. Plus, so often—when you work in any of a number of nonfiction contexts (reference or educational publishing, or medical promotions/advertising)—you encounter unfamiliar jargon and rather unique usages—artifacts of an arcane culture—where you have to translate things to yourself along with having to apply grammatical corrections, and to boot, you may be working under pressure (there is no time to debate “endlessly”).
So how would this phrase be hyphenated? Note how a lot of ad and promotional copy today (for a range of products and consumer audiences) tends to eschew hyphens. But in the more (serious) nonfictional realm, as an editor I tend to err a bit on the side of imposing hyphens (as does the reference and educational field, fairly generally). Plus, a phrase with several words for a compound modifier usually needs it, to be read easily. If the phrase is heard aurally, it doesn’t matter where the hyphen is. But if written out….
So—“dead-on balls accurate”? “dead-on-balls accurate”? “dead-on balls-accurate”? I confess that at first, I don’t know which, because I’m not entirely sure of the precise meaning particular as to the metaphor involved (is what is invoked an image of “dead-on” orientation to balls, i.e., scrotum?), though the more general, intended meaning (“precisely accurate”) is clear enough. Maybe we can come back to this later (we editors tend to take a delayed, cleared-head second swat at something this way, too). (By the way, is an n-dash needed here? No, I’d say.)
We can also refer to our instincts. Tearing out our hair as editors, we can shout, “I just want to be dead on balls accurate!!” Wait—now look at the linguistic “deep structure,” as linguist Noam Chomsky would have termed it. Does this give guidance to where the hyphen should be? How do the words “chunk together” per the meaning that we seem to detect in the expression?
The manners humor is exemplified by Tomei’s impatient young hopeful-cum-“automotive savant”
A lot of the fun of this movie—because of its comedy-of-manners side—has to come from viewing it. It makes no sense to analyze the side where a certain flashy city–Italian American style is flaunted. I don’t know if some might consider this character depiction to be “politically incorrect” today (to judge from the recent popularity of the TV show Jersey Shore
Tomei in particular is fun. Though she often gives a sullen air—she seems largely put upon by this trip to fictional Beechum County, Alabama, where Vinny is meeting a professional demand (compounded by a filial duty) with more of a sense of mission and vigor—Tomei runs a gamut of different kinds of plucky, testing Italian expressions: defiant semi-pouting, occasionally shrewish severity (“It’s called disclosure, you dickhead!”), a plucky look of skepticism, deceptively street-dope pronunciations such as “ax” for ask, and a voice that can seem at the same time prissy-feminine and rough-edged (in attitude). Sometimes, when her voice sometimes seems too high for her personality type, she sounds the way the singer Madonna could sound (helium-voiced) in the 1980s.
Her clothes can be a marvel. In one set piece at a woodland cabin that the prosecuting attorney has allowed Vinny to use, Tomei’s Lisa is dressed in what looks like a full-body leotard with a rather appalling-upholstery design on them. This plus her strutting around impatiently, including a conversational allusion to her frustrated waiting on the marriage issue (her biological clock is ticking, which she emphasizes with horse-like clunks of her foot on the wooden porch), makes her almost a scream as a knows-what-she-wants city type absurdly transplanted to a highly unlikely backwoods location.
Though in this film Tomei might seem something of a vivid forerunner of the echt-ethnic Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi type (while Polizzi is an ethnic Chilean adopted by her Italian-surnamed family), Tomei didn’t get typecast in this kind of role in later movies; quick looks at films like Anger Management (2003) and The Wrestler (2008) show that she isn’t simply about “playing Italian tough-stuffs.”
Another fun point about My Cousin Vinny is that Lisa turns out not to be the airhead fiancee that, at some points, she seems like. For whatever reason she became a hairdresser (as she identifies her current line of work in court), she has performed as an ace auto mechanic, having done, as she testifies, “tune-ups, oil changes, brake relinings, engine rebuilds, rebuilt trannies [transmissions], rear-ends….” This when she is subjected to a voir dire by the prosecuting attorney—being checked out as to whether she is acceptable as a witness—during the trial. She does past muster with the prosecution—and in fact she helps Vinny win the case, which he was 90 percent on the way to winning anyway, with his street smarts married to a careful attorney-style way of poking holes in supposed eyewitness testimony.
Pesci as the puckish heart of the film
Though Tomei seems the flashier source of entertainment, this is Pesci’s picture, in terms of what his Vinny is burdened with pulling off and how Pesci has to make his colorful character work within its context without becoming grating. Though once or twice his performance (as at the woods cabin) veers toward self-parody, he seems the vast majority of the time a warm center of fun, with his reedy tenor of a voice and his fluent way of carrying on. Though the movie may seem to be poking fun at New York “slobs,” actually Vinny (and Lisa in her way) is about precision—the ethos that holds that, when it counts, he can be spot-on as can anyone else. The personality flavor is merely negligible style. When he actually has to contribute his Jesse Jackson–style patch to the social discourse, he is not dropping the ball.
In fact, Italian personality style can be so much a matter of precision “timing” that… I’ll give an example from popular music. Lately, there is a musical running, Jersey Boys, that makes a story with the music of the pop group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. As time marches on and today’s young wouldn’t make as much of a fuss over anachronisms concerning “what was really 1960s versus what was really 1970s,” some points of style matter less. But when I hear a radio (or TV) commercial for this musical and the song “December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)” gets thrown in with all the familiar Four Seasons songs of the 1960s, it annoys me a bit, because that latter song is very much 1970s. That and “Who Loves You”; both were from 1975. The two 1970s songs very much didn’t feature much of Frankie Valli, whose falsetto was such a trademark feature of the 1960s hits (which, as such, had a flavor of city street singing). Valli sings in a bridge or such in “December 1963,” but otherwise the lead vocals are handled by a newcomer to the group. In some general sense, this fact reflected changes in the group’s career and in broader musical tastes among the record-buying public. This mattered quite a bit in those days; the old-time Four Seasons stuff sounded hackneyed and silly to many by about 1975.
Italian Americans, if anything, understand this aspect of style. That’s why (may I say this without offending too many?) they can seem so much slaves to current style (whether in clothing or otherwise)—and I try to explain this while being a real style philistine myself (you should see how I dress): for those where superficial style is crucial, precision is a key complement to style: how the accessories are used, what colors are juxtaposed. And in this movie’s case, the precision associated with their street-smarts look and manner also comes up in their serious business: Vinny knows the court rules once he has to roll in the courtroom, and Lisa’s precision-oriented knowledge of cars becomes a crucial underpinning of her own helpful testimony.
Vinny, in the month that this film actually depicts (the alleged crime is in early January and the trial starts in early February), has a steep learning curve in which he must learn court rules and procedure. It is somewhat true (don’t quote me; I can’t explain here in what respects this is precisely true and not), as I’ve found in various anecdotal ways (including from a practicing lawyer/friend), that per Vinny’s self-excusing statement (I may paraphrase a bit), “Law school teaches contracts, procedures, and interpretations. The firm that hires you teaches procedure, or you could go to a court and watch. [But] between school and working in my father’s [auto repair] shop, I had no time to go to court.”
One thing I can tell you from experience as a pro se defendant—and which I don’t know was intended as a joke by the film or not—is that Vinny’s way of reading the Alabama book on Rules of Civil Procedure, like a novel open on his lap, is not how you would learn court rules. Rather, you would have an easier time if you read them pragmatically, specifically with reference to what you want to do next, consulting them like a phone book or an encyclopedia. Reading them cover-to-cover would surely drive anyone nuts. (All the more humorous is how Lisa delves into this book to find out what Vinny’s rights were in terms of getting copies of the prosecution’ records. For what seems like a flinty, posturing young woman, she can be pretty darned smart sometimes.)
Of course, the real juice that arises in Vinny’s redemptive court performance comes from his family’s characteristic of being good arguers; the Gambinis “live to argue,” explains Bill to his friend Stan.
Precision when it counts
The film’s main point, maybe surprising for such an apparent lark of a story, is that when it comes to crime (and adjudicating civil disputes), factual details and proper court procedure are so important. The fabric of our society, in its most serious transactions, hangs on being precise about conventions and the rules. It separates the civilized man—even if he, in his free time, wears leather jackets, has his belt rakishly looped over, and sports tall hair—from the reprobate against whom society would seek sanctions. It allows appearance at the “dinner table” for Vinny and Lisa with equal respect along with Fred Gwynne’s formidable, stickler-for-rules Judge Haller, the courtly prosecuting attorney Jim Trotter, and Bruce McGill’s straight-cop, yet ultimately boys-saving, sheriff Farley.
