"From what I've seen of the rich, you can have 'em," snorts the lawyer to his client.
"I do," the client replies, through a carnivorous smile.
The lawyer is Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver). The client is Claus von Bulow (Jeremy Irons), a man who had one of the very richest, an heiress named Sunny (Glenn Close), who now lingers in an endless coma. When Dershowitz and von Bulow first meet, Claus is seeking someone to help him with his appeal after being convicted of attempted murder. Dershowitz, despite considerable reservations, takes the case.
Director Barbet Schroeder's delectable "Reversal of Fortune" reconstructs the infamous von Bulow scandal and makes it more mystifying than ever by presenting it as a real-life "Rashomon." As a result, Claus' defenders may question their position after seeing the film, but his critics may have some moments of self-doubt as well.
The marriage of Sunny and Claus is played mostly for extraordinarily dark comedy, a marathon of extracurricular affairs, pill-popping and mind games. While Sunny was usually portrayed in newspaper accounts as a meek, frail romantic taken for a ride by gigolo Claus, Close's portrait is far deeper and more colorful. On one hand, she's Sunny the Valium Zombie, a paranoid hypoglycemic whose meals consist mostly of sundaes and cigarettes and who celebrates Christmas by washing down various drugs with multiple cups of eggnog. But Close isn't entirely unsympathetic to the woman; when Sunny begs Claus for love, then insists she likes to sleep with the window open in mid-winter because she finds the chill "reassuring" she brings a sad resonance to the stereotype of the poor little rich girl.
Speaking of chilliness, it's a credit to Irons that he somehow manages to make Claus' icy facade alluring and compelling. His frozen heart is sheathed in a suave, even-tempered exterior that slowly wins your trust.
But just when you start to think perhaps Claus was unjustly accused, pesky details creep into the picture. If Claus wasn't plotting Sunny's death, why did he show his mistress a legal analysis of Sunny's will? Why did he lie to the doctor who investigated Sunny's first coma? And what possible reason could there have been for him to spend five whole days in a cramped apartment with his mother's corpse before reporting the death to the authorities. In the eyes of Schroeder and company, Claus may or may not have tried to kill Sunny but it's certain he did very little to stop her from destroying herself.
In any case, it's the sorrowful Sunny whose presence hangs over everything. "I never came out of this coma," Sunny remarks in her ethereal narration, adding with a hint of mischief, "and I never will." We may never learn the truth about what really went on inside the von Bulow's Newport estate during that black Christmas, but "Reversal of Fortune" serves up plenty of fascinating theories. James Sanford
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