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My Cousin Vinny

The 1992 Twentieth Century Fox film, My Cousin Vinny, stars Joe Pesci as Vinny

Gambini who is a lawyer from Brooklyn with no experience. Vinny must protect his nephew and

his nephew’s best friend after they are charged with the killing of a convenience store operator in

a small town, Alabama. Fred Gwynne is the judge a stickler for procedural details. The key to the

success of Vinny as a lawyer is in the heart and the head of his outspoken girlfriend. As a jobless

hairdresser and a specialist in out mechanics, Marisa Tomei steals the movie with her surprising

performance.

Jonathan Lynn, the film’s director, makes the most out of the cultural differences

between the characters. The film is arguably both progressive and regressive elements of

ethnicity, race, and gender. Throughout the movie, the lead protagonists, Vinny and Lisa are

marginalized since they have Italian-American identity. They are therefore stereotyped with

having traits which take after the Italian-Americans who are involved with the mafia. The movie

also engages the Southerners, or town locals of Wazoo, Alabama, who are stereotyped as yokels.

They have traits which depict them as a group of people who are not normal and who interfere

with the hegemonic distinctiveness of normative American whiteness.

Nonetheless, the film has certain elements that can be seen as progressive since it shows

the Italian-American female lead, Lisa, challenging the gender roles assigned to her. At the same

time, her fiancé Vinny, the male lead, make use of an integrationist strategy with transcoding to
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create a positive image successfully in the manner that other the characters see him. Generally

speaking, the film, My Cousin Vinny is a crowd-pleasing comedy.