REVERSAL OF FORTUNE: The OJ of the 80's

Author: Sean Gallagher
Published on: Jul 15, 2001

It seems like there have been so many notorious trials in the 90's (Rodney King, OJ), that anything coming before is a distant memory. But in the early 80's, the trial which seemed most to capture the country was the trial of Claus Von Bulow. A Danish aristocrat living in Rhode Island, Von Bulow was convicted in 1982 of trying to kill his wife, Sunny, in the winter of 1980, by giving her an overdose of insulin, which sent her into a coma (Sunny also had an insulin attack in December of 1979, but she woke up from that). Von Bulow then hired Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and part-time lawyer, to represent him during his appeal. Eventually, through Dershowitz's work, Von Bulow's verdict was overturned on appeal. Dershowitz wrote a book about the case called REVERSAL OF FORTUNE. While the Von Bulow saga has cheap made-for-TV movie written all over it, Dershowitz made it a fascinating true-life legal drama, and director Barbet Schroeder and writer Nicholas Kazan have kept true to that, while adding a comic spin to the material.

Mostly, the book was about the legal aspects of the original case and the appeal, and the movie does cover that. It gives Dershowitz (Ron Silver) a case not in the book (defending two black kids who were convicted of a crime they didn't commit), and an ex-girlfriend (Annabella Sciorra) whom he convinces to come back and help him on the case, but mostly, it sticks to the facts - or, rather, as close to the facts as anybody could guess. At first, when Dershowitz assembles a team of lawyers and law students to help him with the appeal, they all assume, as Dershowitz does, that Von Bulow is guilty (a student (Felicity Huffman) castigates Dershowitz for taking the case for that very reason). Dershowitz agrees to represent Von Bulow (Jeremy Irons) because, as he explained to the student, "I take cases because I get p***ed off. And I am p***ed off here!" - he thought Sunny's family (who pursued the case in the first place)hiring a private investigator, and feeding whatever evidence they wanted to the police, set a dangerous precedent. The other students and lawyers, on the other hand, simply see this as an amusing exercise. But that's before they fully dive into it.

As has been reported elsewhere, there were all kinds of nagging questions which were raised by the case, even after Von Bulow's conviction was overturned (like why Von Bulow did nothing to help Sunny after her first coma). This is where Schroeder, Kazan, and Irons come in. Part of why Von Bulow was convicted in the first trial is that he came across as a cold personality. That's not quite the full story (in the book, Dershowitz claimed Von Bulow was always the first to tell the jokes made about him, i.e., "What do you give the person who has everything?" "A shot of insulin"), but the movie keeps him at a distance, so we can never quite get into his head. Irons makes him aloof, but also someone who seems to get a perverse pleasure out of what's happening to him (he says at one point he's gotten better tables at restaurants since the trial started). Strangely, while Dershowitz ends up not really knowing what he thinks about Von Bulow (except that legally, there's reasonable doubt of his guilt), his team remains uncowed. There's a great scene at a Chinese restaurant where each of the students purposely empties the prawn dish Von Bulow had expressed fondness for, as if to tell him they don't trust him any farther than they could throw him. And while the movie avoids what the public in general thought of Von Bulow, there is the great scene at the end where Von Bulow goes into a grocery store, asks the cashier for some items, sees a tabloid newspaper with his picture on the cover, and then adds, "And a shot of insulin - just kidding." (Kazan claimed he started writing the screenplay with this scene in mind).

Irons won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance here, and while I preferred Gerard Depardieu in CYRANO DE BERGERAC, Irons would be my second choice. As I said, he's droll, aloof, and perverse, and he never makes the mistake of trying to explain Von Bulow to us. Silver is equally as good as Dershowitz, playing him as someone who has to use more legal wits than he thought in this gray area of a case. There's also nice supporting work from people like Christine Baranski as Von Bulow's mistress, Fisher Stevens as David Marriot, the drug dealer who knows more than he's telling, and Sciorra. The one weak element for me was having Sunny (Glenn Close) narrate the movie. Close is perfectly fine in the flashback elements - as someone even colder and more aloof than Von Bulow - but her narrating the film seems unnecessary, obvious (we don't need to be told "Nobody will ever know" when we've been shown that), and a rare example of Schroeder et al being too proud of their own cleverness.

Someday, someone might try and make a serious-minded movie about the OJ Simpson trial and what it revealed about America at the time. What the Von Bulow trial revealed about us wasn't much - as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, the rich are different than you and me - but at the very least, REVERSAL OF FORTUNE is an entertaining and thought-provoking version of that story.

Next time, a short look at the other two movies in the Best Actor category, CYRANO DE BERGERAC and THE FIELD.