REVERSAL OF FORTUNE
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1990 Frank Maloney
This movie is based on Alan Dershowitz's book about his defense of Claus von Bulow, who had been convicted of attempting to kill his rich, socialite wife Sunny with a large injection of insulin that put her into a permanent vegetative state. Dershowitz is a prominent law prof. at Harvard who writes a syndicated column on constitutional, legal, and liberal issues for the New York Times.
The movie is narrated by Glenn Close, whose character Sunny is already in the final coma of her life (she is "alive" today). This is a permanent stumbling block for the movie. I'm never very comfortable with a voice-over; movies ought not to need narrators. And a out-of-body narrator is really pushing the limits.
Jeremy Irons turns in an astonishing performance as the chimeric von Bulow (Ron Silver as Dershowitz says to Irons: "You're a very weird man." And Irons as von Bulow replies: "You have no idea.") It is the kind of strange and eerie characterization of an unknowable character that leaves one gasping in admiration and wondering where in the name of all that's cinematic did Irons get the clue, the resource, the insight, the starting point in creating such a very weird man.
Silvers' Dershowitz is never explained to us. We get a some defining scenes and speeches about his role as a man wild about law and protecting the poor and the innocent; even the defense of von Bulow is seen as a way of keeping the poor from being victimized by the rich (for an explanation of this, seek elsewhere), but these are templates of the standard liberal, Jewish lawyer. His Jewishness is featured prominently throughout the movie, by the way. Not quite a stereotype, however.
Through the early parts of the movie, I feared that Close, who is one of my personal faves, was not going to get a chance to act. However, through the miracle of flashbacks she got a couple of chances to remind once again how very good she is.
The pleasure, and perhaps purpose, of REVERSAL OF FORTUNE is the wonderful acting. The problem, other than the narrative, is that the movie is terribly schizophrenic. Half of it a legal-procedures movie, not unlike PRESUMED INNOCENT, for example. Part of it is a character study. Very little is a whodunit. (Since this is a true story, and all the principals are real and living, this last aspect had to be treated, I imagine, with some circumspection.)
Oh, yes, and it's rather funny in many places, but the newspapers ads calling it a comedy are probably a fall-back marketing strategy. It ain't a comedy.
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Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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