REVERSAL OF FORTUNE (1990)

Country: U.S.A. / Japan / U.K.

Genre(s): Drama

Director: Barbet Schroeder

Cast: Jeremy Irons / Ron Silver / Glenn Close

Plot

Convicted of the attempted murder of his socialite wife, Claus von Bulow hires attorney Alan Dershowitz to handle his appeal.  Based on the infamous, real-life legal case.

Thoughts

It is the performances here that really make this film work above all else.  Jeremy Irons is at his chilling best as Claus von Bulow, a universally despised man convicted of causing his wife Sunny’s coma with insulin injections.  It’s difficult to think of a better instance of casting, and Irons won the Best Actor Oscar that year for the performance.  Irons allows viewers to easily understand why so many found von Bulow guilty simply for his icy demeanor, effete pretentions, and repulsive ego.  Even when he tries to cast himself as the victim and conjure up some kind of human sympathy, the character fails miserably, an unusual character trait in film, which Irons handles magnificently.  Where many actors and filmmakers would try to show a main character, criminal or not, as somehow sympathetic once you peel away the cold, hard exterior, Irons, along with director Barbet Schroeder and screenwriter Nicholas Kazan, show that no matter how many layers one peels back on von Bulow one just finds a deeper moral vacuum.  However, being completely self-centered and incapable of remorse does not necessarily mean that von Bulow is guilty of the crime.  It is this aspect of the von Bulow case which makes the task before his attorney, Allen Dershowitz, all the more challenging.  Ron Silver and Glenn Close are also terrific as Dershowitz and Sunny von Bulow respectively, which should be no surprise as both actors are typically excellent in any role they take on.

Beyond some interesting choices in storytelling and scripting, and aside from the previously mentioned actors, “Reversal of Fortune” is really standard baby boomer American drama of the 1980s and early 1990s from a filmmaking perspective.  There’s little in the way of style or flash, which is surprising since Schroeder was a central figure in the very stylized French “New Wave” cinema of prior decades.  For this film, though, the conventional cinematography and editing works, allowing the story and characters to take center stage, rather than any artistic pretentions of the filmmaker.

Most Memorable Scene

When the middle-aged snob von Bulow sits on a wooden chair in Dershowitz’s cluttered and noisy suburban home, surrounded by a team of mostly young law students, one gets a portrait of just how detached von Bulow and his class are from the rest of the world and of just how disgusted they are by it.  His back comically straight, his legs crossed effeminately, his clothing pressed and his hair immaculate, von Bulow’s face practically twitches with repulsion at virtually everything he sees, touches, or hears.  Meanwhile, to the others, and to the viewer, von Bulow comes off as nearly extraterrestrial, some comically bizarre creature crash-landed on a world from which he wants nothing more than escape and forced to endure the primitive ways of the natives.

My Rating: 4 out of 5