Reversal of Fortune.

Reversal of Fortune

In Reversal of Fortune, as you may know, the millionairess Sunny von Bulow is lying in a coma that, unlike fortune, is unfortunately irreversible. Claus von Bulow, her playboy husband, has been found guilty by a Newport jury of twice trying to kill her with insulin shots. Alan Dershowitz, the high-powered Harvard Law School professor, is about to win an appeal for a new trial, in which von Bulow will be acquitted. Claus, a Danish quasi-aristocrat, as flippant as he is eccentric, is being flip again. Dershowitz exhorts: "This is life and death. Your wife is laying in a coma."

God knows, bad English is not the worst offense of this thoroughly offensive movie, written by Nicholas Kazan (son of Elia) from Alan Dershowitz's book, and co-produced by Elon Dershowitz (son of Alan), who is portrayed by Stephen Mailer (son of Norman). But in momentous moments of stress and tension, there is nothing like a piece of whopping illiteracy to reduce everything to a ridiculous shambles. I don't know who laid that "laying" on us: Alan D., Nick K, or Ron Silver, who enacts Alan--or, for that matter, Barbet Schroeder, the the "highbrow" French director, whose English is usually good. Let them share the blame.

Respect for any rules or decencies, however, is not what this movie is about. For starters, the voiceover narration throughout is by Sunny (Glenn Close), the woman in a coma, as the camera promptly shows her (in flashbacks, she is vertical). To me, there is something ineffably tasteless, almost sacrilegious, about using someone brain-dead as a dramatic device, exploiting the disparity between her actual condition and the mischievously jocular things she says (totally out of character for the first shy, then withdrawn woman she was in her active life) to elicit a kind of metaphysical titillation. (Jack Kroll, in Newsweek, calls this one of the film's many "clever, unsettling, and even brilliant ideas.")

The film provides highlights from the first trial, and ignores the second. It concentrates, like the book, on showing how Dershowitz got Claus off the hook, even though he found him personally uncongenial: a hard-working, by no means uncelebrated or underpaid Jewish lawyer from a humble background, small of stature, casually dressed, and unsightly, confronting a tall, well-spoken (British accent with Danish highlights), elegantly attired and expensively groomed upper-cruster, doubtless anti-Semitic. (His father, a drama critic, was one of Denmark's very few Nazi collaborators; his mother was indeed a Bulow, but the "von" is entirely of Claus's making.) Their verbal sparring is not uninteresting even in the movie(though doubtless juicier in life), especially when there are others present, e.g., Claus's new mistress, Andres Reynolds, a Hungarian adventuress; or Dershowitz's Harvard students, a large team of whom went to work on every aspect of the case with the task of unearthing in a hundred days something that would justify a retrial. they did: a technicality.

And that's just it. The film makes much of several ironies. It is the crass Andrea who advised Claus, "Get the Jew!" And Dershowitz, who was at first sure that Claus was guilty, nevertheless managed to convince himself of Claus's innocence (though the film, finally, implies otherwise). He was paid an enormous sum by Claus, but, as the film keeps relentlessly and sanctimoniously reminding us, all the money went into the defense of two young blacks on death row down South, whom Dershowitz has thus far kept alive. What we see of Claus's home life--total frigidity with Sunny, both carnal and climatic, she insisting on open bedroom windows through the long winter nights at Clarendon Court, their Newport mansion--is contrasted with Alan's life as a mensch, a warm friend to his students, his sons, and an ex-girlfriend especially invented for the movie, who comes to work on the Claus research team. Every chance they get, they play basketball; during these games Alan sprouts his best ideas.

But the main irony is ignored. It is that in working-class Providence, R.I., a city known for its political corruption, the case (unlike in upper-class Newport) was in the hands of a suspect legal apparatus and a benighted jury. Dershowitz, on the other hand, disposed of a battery of crack law students whom he did not even have to pay, and who worked their butts off for their famous and fatherly mentor. And indeed it is a student who makes the crucial discovery that his prof is able to parlay into a victory. And all the time Claus's case was financed by a son of his former employer, J. Paul Getty, who seems to have poured a cool million into it. We hear Dershowitz make some impassioned speeches about how even rich (well, richly married--Claus had no money of his own) immoralists deserve a fair trial, etc., etc., etc. But the final, unexplored irony lies precisely in that "even": I have very little doubt that the rich can buy themselves first-class consideration; it is the others I worry about--others who donht make such good political capital as the two blacks on death row in the South.

Some of those who knew Claus have pointed out mistakes in the film about the decor at Clarendon Court and some of the details of the von Bulows' daily life. What matters more is that all the major characters in the film are distortions of reality. Sunny was not the hard-edged, cigar-store-Indianish virago into which Glenn Close turns every character she plays; rather, she was a pretty, unbright, lost little rich girl who married consecutively two European aristocrats or pseudo-aristocrats with neither of whom she had much in common, and who, unsuccessful socially, withdrew more and more into neurasthenia. Miss Close's performance doesn't come close.

Claus was (is) a very tall, large-bonned, sinisterly attractive man-about-town, a strange mixture of outward solidity and inner sociopathic deviousness. The actor who could have properly portrayed him, starting with physical resemblance, is the late Curt Jurgens. Jeremy Irons, a charming lightweight and flibbertigibbet, too vain to espouse even Claus's near-baldness, gives the man an almost touching brittleness. He has clearly studied Claus's speech, and even though he can't get the soupcon of Danishness, the vioce emerges so ponderously out of that weak face as to seem piped--or bassooned--in electronically.

Ron Silver comes nearer to being Dershowitz, but though he has the original's Jewishness and raffishness, he lacks his puniness and ferretiness. Still, he is at least in the ball park, or is it theme park? The only reality in the film is in the opening helicopter shot of Newport's Millionaires' Row; after that, tendentious fiction takes over. Particularly specious is the way the research team is cast: carefully balanced between men and women, blacks and whites, Occidentals and Orientals, WASPs and Jew and Hispanics. It's not so much the Harvard Law School as the Family of Man.

Especially hilarious is the early scene in which one bright female student--self-righteously played by the smug Felicity Huffman--starts to walk out on the team rather than defend the manifestly guilty Claus. there follows a holier-than-thou Q&A session wherein Dershowitz, via Socratic dialetics, proves the nobility of the cause, as opposed to the man. But what the movie is finally selling--aside from titillation (famous criminal case), catering to low curiousity (how do the very rich live?), and ego massage (the rich are weird and unhappy; you are better and better off)--is an odd-ball fun couple, somewhat in the Schwarzenegger-De Vito mold: von Bulow and Dershowitz, the blueblooded Bluebeard and the ethnic legal beagle together in a glitzy caper.