REVERSAL OF FORTUNE (1990) C widescreen 120m dir: Barbet Schroeder

w/Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, Ron Silver, Annabella Sciorra, Uta Hagen, Fisher Stevens, Christine Baranski, Mano Singh, Felicity Huffman, Alan Pottinger

From The Movie Guide: "A cool, quirky adaptation of lawyer Alan Dershowitz's book about his successful appeal of Claus von Bulow's conviction for the attempted murder of his wife, Martha 'Sunny' von Bulow. Neither docudrama nor out-and-out fiction, REVERSAL OF FORTUNE is somewhere in between, a darkly humorous, determinedly ambiguous delight. Schroeder begins with Sunny (Glenn Close), who narrates the film from the vantage point of her 'persistent vegetative state' --- recalling William Holden's ghostly narration of SUNSET BOULEVARD. She summarizes the first murder trial, which ended with Claus (Jeremy Irons) convicted and released on bail pending appeal. The drama really begins when Claus approaches Harvard Law professor Dershowitz (Ron Silver) to handle the case. ...

"Irons's canny performance dominates the film. He plays the role with apparent frankness and dignity rather than melodramatic villainy, and Schroeder's camera frames him in isolation to convey his bleakness and solitude. Claus remains, above all, enigmatic. The movie finally 'guesses' that Claus didn't mean to kill Sunny, and Sunny didn't necessarily mean to kill herself. In fact, the point of Schroeder's film is not 'whodunit?', but the suggestion that, in the end, legal guilt and moral culpability are not the same thing at all. REVERSAL OF FORTUNE is one of those rare films that deals with class difference in supposedly classless America, which makes for an unusually provocative tragicomedy of (bad) manners."

Irons won an Oscar for his performance. The film was also nominated for Best Director and Adapted Screenplay (Nicholas Kazan).