leeper@mtgzy.att.com (Mark R. Leeper) (11/09/90)
REVERSAL OF FORTUNE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Famous lawyer Alan Dershowitz defends
Claus von Bulow in this adaptation of Dershowitz's book.
While none of the characters is anyone you would really want
to know or even deal with, some of the re-assessment of what
appears initially to be an "open and shut" case is
reminiscent of TWELVE ANGRY MEN. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4).
There is an old exchange where one person says, "The rich are different
from us." And the other person responds, "Yes, they have more money."
REVERSAL OF FORTUNE gives us glimpses into quite a few things but one is the
lifestyles of the very rich. What we see is less than totally inviting. In
REVERSAL OF FORTUNE our first impressions of Claus von Bulow play off all
our prejudices against the European aristocracy. He is cultured, cold,
emotionless, and calculating. He seems a marble statue that has been
granted the power of speech. In a sense he is the damsel-in-distress of
this piece. As the film begins he has already been found guilty of the
attempted murder of his wife Sunny. To avoid going to prison he gets trial
lawyer and professor of law Alan Dershowitz to defend him. Of course, as a
matter of record Dershowitz did successfully appeal the conviction and in a
retrial had von Bulow acquitted of the charges. REVERSAL OF FORTUNE, based
on Dershowitz's own book, is the story of how Alan Dershowitz defended the
impassive Claus von Bulow.
The film also gives us a view into Dershowitz's unorthodox defense
procedures. He turns his house into a workshop with teams in each room
researching the legal ramifications of a different piece of evidence against
von Bulow. The teams even have sweatshirts labeled with the piece of
evidence they are working on. Dershowitz may be bragging about the
completeness of his approach but, in fact, one may wonder at the fairness of
expending this magnitude of resource in a legal action. Dershowitz
moralizes why he should take the case even if von Bulow is so likely guilty,
but the audience never works up the respect for him and his methods that it
has for the dramatized Clarence Darrow in INHERIT THE WIND or the dramatized
Louis Nizer in A CASE OF LIBEL. His causes are not so noble and his fees
are higher. As unflattering as this film was to Claus, whose only moments
of humanity seem to be when he is having fun with his own ghoulish image in
the press, REVERSAL OF FORTUNE is far less flattering to Sunny. This
daughter of the idle rich is shown to have been mostly dead already by his
own actions. She is totally idle and self-indulgent. Her hours out of bed,
which number only six a day, are a constant struggle to pass through he
system every drug she can lay her shaking hands on. Regardless of anything
Claus did, we are led to believe that death or near-death was the expected
and logical result of an incredibly self-destructive lifestyle. If she was
really as portrayed, one wonders how she survived as long as she did.
In addition to Dershowitz's moralizing, there is one more piece of
moralizing that is irritating in the film. The film pokes fun at von
Bulow's patronizing, if well-intentioned, attitude toward Dershowitz being
Jewish. Yet several times the camera takes opportunities to remind us that
Dershowitz is not just a lawyer, he is a JEWISH lawyer. Camera angles are
chosen to show a painting on a Jewish theme in Dershowitz's office or to
show a menorah in his home. The camera is just as hung up on religion as is
von Bulow.
Of the three stars, Glenn Close as Sunny von Bulow has top billing and
got the least screen time. She does, however, narrate the story in spite of
the fact that it makes little sense to have a narrator who is speaking from
a coma and who was less than a clear thinker even before her coma. Some
attention has been paid to Jeremy Irons's performance as Claus, though I
have always thought it is easier to be convincingly weird than to be
convincingly normal.
On the whole, REVERSAL OF FORTUNE panders a bit too much to the fans of
crime "docudramas." But it is told with wit and subtlety. I would give it
a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzy!leeper
leeper@mtgzy.att.comfrankm@microsoft.UUCP (Frank Maloney) (11/28/90)
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.
--
Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney