My Blue Heaven
         
Director: Herbert Ross
Year: 1990
Rating: 5.0
Damn, with the talent involved with this film, it came as a shock at how flat it is. Like an opened can of coke for a day. It is a comedy with few laughs and dialogue with no snap. You have Herbert Ross as the director of The Owl and the Pussycat, Play It Again Sam, Funny Lady and The Goodbye Girl fame. A script by Nora Ephron of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle fame and a coterie of some of my favorite actors from that period; Steve Martin, Rick Moranis, Joan Cusack, Carol Kane, Daniel Stern, Colleen Camp, Bill Irwin, William Hickey and Melanie Mayron. I sat down expecting to be laughing for the next 90 minutes - and kept waiting and waiting. Like waiting for Godot. Or a bus at 2am. It is pleasant enough - a lot of situations that should have been funny but weren't. Maybe a comedy about a mafia member in a witness protection program is just not the stuff of comedy. From what I read; it is based on the same true character that Goodfellas was based on. Goodfellas was as best I remember not a comedy. Maybe they should have gone for a black comedy. But this is sitcom material.



Martin plays Vinnie with his hair straight up like he had an electric shock and a Brooklyn American Italian accent that has been dipped in ravioli. To get out of going to jail, he has promised to rat on his old boss who had a few people killed. His FBI keeper is Coopersmith (Moranis) who is as straight as J. Edgar Hoover was bent. The FBI gets Vinnie and his wife a nice home with a yard in small town America. His wife leaves him five minutes after getting there because she is so bored. When folks call out hello, he tells them to fuck off. He wants good Italian food and a place to drink with the boys. Just stay out of trouble and lay low till you testify, Coopersmith tells him. But he is a conman, liar and petty crook and in no time gets picked up for stealing a car. The D.A. is Cusack and she wants to try him - but Coopersmith tells her she can't. He is protected by the FBI. A get out of jail card and Vinnie sees nothing to stop him from more criminal activity.



It should be funny - his lies are clever and silly - but they don't land. Vinnie is kind of an unfeeling idiot - not a really bad guy - just a loser with a linguini tongue for every situation. And for reasons unknown, the film spends time on the failed marriages of the D.A. and Coopersmith and their mutual attraction. At some point, you know Vinny will redeem himself and find life in Americana just perfect. Kane plays a woman he picks up but she gets very little screen time, Stern is the D.A.'s ex-husband - he doesn't get much time either, Camp is Coopersmith ex-wife and doesn't get much time, Irwin is a fellow FBI agent and Mayron is probably the best thing in the film as a cop who falls from Vinnie. A lot of wasted talent right there.