Reversal of Fortune
“We can’t all be you, Alan.”
This line, spoken by Claus von Bulow (Jeremy Irons) to Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver) gets to the heart of my reservations about this fine 1990 movie. “Reversal of Fortune” is a paean to the genius of Dershowitz, and its commitment to showing his unmatched intelligence, wit, verve and moral fortitude makes me queasy. He gets to make big showy speeches about the sanctity of the legal system; he turns his home into a legal-eagle commune where his students prod each other to excellence between games of basketball and ping-pong; in his spare time, he defends “two black kids” (as he always refers to them) on death row for a crime they didn’t commit. All of this may be true, but the tone is altogether too worshipful.
It’s much more fun observing fragments of the absurd, self-destructive marriage between socialites Claus and Sunny von Bulow, which effectively ends when Sunny (Glenn Close) slips into a persistent vegetative state after an overdose of insulin, among other drugs. As the movie opens, Claus has been convicted of trying to kill Sunny, and it’s Dershowitz’s job to reverse that verdict on appeal. In a bravura stroke from director Barbet Schroeder and screenwriter Nicholas Kazan, Sunny narrates the movie from her living limbo. Schroeder and Kazan don’t cheat, though: They never let Sunny reveal what’s never been determined — exactly what caused the coma. The movie relies on Claus’ recollections and other public records; Sunny’s narration is a stylistic device that humanizes her but doesn’t leap into the unknowable. “Reversal of Fortune,” then, is a fine example of how cinema can mix objective and subjective points of view to explore the elusiveness of truth. Schroeder handles the complicated structure with ease; he is a talented filmmaker who seemed to lose his ambition after this movie, churning out schlocky thrillers, until he redeemed himself with “Our Lady of the Assassins.”
Schroeder has a sure hand with his actors. As played by Close and Irons, Sunny and Claus never become stereotypes of the idle rich. Close movingly plumbs Sunny’s sadness and desperation. She knows her marriage is a sham and can live with that, but when confronted with love letters written by Claus’ mistress or Claus’ suggestion that they divorce, she breaks down, and Close earns the pathos. Whether her husband pushed her over the edge or not, Sunny was clearly suicidal. And Irons, who won the Academy Award for Best Actor, brings a redemptive eccentricity to Claus. He is comfortable with wealth and privilege, yet he can’t adhere to the role of a docile society husband. Irons makes you want to believe Claus, yet he never lets you forget how Claus feels trapped, how frightened he is by his wife’s volcanic unpredictability — and how such feelings may have prodded him to try to kill her. With lesser actors, you might ask, “Who cares about these people?” But Irons and Close make them impossible to dismiss.