Reversal of Fortune (1990)

Directed by Barbet Schroeder. Starring Jeremy Irons, Ron Silver, Glenn Close, Annabella Sciorra, Fisher Stevens, Uta Hagen, Christine Baranski, Jack Gilpin, Felicity Huffman, Stephen Mailer, Mano Singh, Julie Hagerty. [R]

Says Alan Dershowitz, “You’re a very strange man.” Responds Claus von Bülow, “You have no idea.” This is what makes the film so fascinating. There’s a big mystery at the center of the story—did Claus von Bülow (Irons) give his rich, hypoglycemic wife, Sunny (Close), an insulin overdose that put her into a permanent coma or not?—but the filmmakers have no intention of solving it, instead offering up multiple theories of what might have happened and leaving it at that. There’s an appeal case to be tried, with Dershowitz (Silver) and his team working hard to come up with a winning defense, but only a few minutes of screentime are spent inside a courtroom. Running through all of those more conventional genre elements, however, is the blackly comic (and amusingly uncertain) character study of Claus and the satirical barbs directed at the posh, isolated upper class in which Sunny resided (aside from a few shots of her comatose form, Close appears only in flashbacks and provides the intriguing tour-guide narration that’s as aloof as it is tragic, as impishly incisive as it is softly neurotic). Silver is terrific as Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor and attorney revealed in the years since to be probably even more problematic than his client, and Close is playfully inscrutable, but it’s Irons’ brilliantly controlled performance, replete with archly unmodulated vocal stylings, peculiar mannerisms, and “relaxed” physical rigidity, that makes it all work so well—such a strange man, you have no idea. Adapted by Nicholas Kazan from Dershowitz’s book of the same name (subtitled: “Inside the von Bülow Case”). Irons won the Academy Award.

85/100