REVERSAL OF FORTUNE nudges your table manners in its opening credits, with a helicopter tracking shot gliding past the lordly structures and lofty landscaping of the Newport, Rhode Island dwellings occupied by the rapier tip of the upper class, a visual eavesdrop into the alternate reality they occupy. As with their international ilk, this power-pampered breed may as well be another specie. Like reptiles, they can be fascinating. Some are goofy, often charming, mostly harmless (frogs, turtles). Others are repulsive (crocodiles, rattlesnakes). Then there are vipers and Komodo dragons. Scientists, zookeepers and what’s left of indigenous hunter-gatherers know how to handle them. Tax-sheltered in more elaborate burrows, their rich human counterparts have an instinctive defense mechanism called lawyers. Oh, right, we already mentioned snakes…*
In 1982, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, 43, is hired by socialite Claus von Bülow, 56, to represent him in appealing his conviction over the attempted murder of his wife Sunny, 51, who was in a permanent vegetative state after suffering a coma, seemingly induced by injections of insulin. The uber-shrewd Dershowitz (just picturing him makes me want to hire counsel, after barfing) has doubts about the teasingly evasive Claus, but his shark-to-blood sense is whetted enough to seize the challenge of reopening the case. With his team of keen law students, he dives into the rarefied regions of the Bülow’s world, the company they kept and the guarded psyche of a Claus who was nothing close to a Santa.
The intriguing script by Nicholas Kazan (Frances, At Close Range, Patty Hearst) was based on Dershowitz’s book “Reversal Of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case” (1985, 276 pages). Barbet Shroeder (Barfly) directed, with cinematographer Luciano Tovoli (The Desert Of The Tartars, Suspiria, eight Schroeder projects) shooting in New Jersey (Montclair), Rhode Island (Newport) and New York (Tarrytown, Manhattan, Long Island).
Just as the surreal-life story itself was a feast for gossip and catnip for attorneys, the script makes tasty material for the actors, but bear in mind its indulgence in invention for drama’s sake (eh, so much for literal truth and pesky facts) and that the book it was based on asks you to accept its author’s version as unbiased. We’re talking the supremely obnoxious, sickeningly self-righteous Alan Dershowitz here, whose skill as a lawyer is clearly estimable, but whose client list crucifies him as one of the most reprehensible examples of his profession. While the screenplay leaves grey areas for Claus, Sunny and their circle, it paints an admiring portrait of Dershowitz as a ‘fighter for truth’ (uh, those “two black kids facing the electric chair” were actually white) and when Silver/Alan straight-faced declares “I’m not a hired gun. I’ve got to feel there’s some moral or constitutional issue at stake“, it’s hard not to do a spit-take into your popcorn. Or Beluga caviar. **
Silver bristles as the focus driven Dershowitz, and Close does her typical submersive work as the gradually disintegrating Sunny. Good as they are (playing unsympathetic individuals), the honors go to Irons, who—after Close convinced him to take the part—strolled away with the Oscar for Best Actor. The challenge of a simultaneously guarded and casually open character like von Bülow was not to take the easy arched-eyebrow-and-sneer route of simple villainy. Irons brilliantly makes him both elegant and oily, attractive and discomforting, charming and chilly, as mesmerizing as a cobra. That deep, deceptive gravelly purr of a voice and sinewy yet imperious bearing has figured in much finely etched work throughout his career (we champion Dead Ringers and Kingdom Of Heaven), none were more of a dangerous liaison than in Reversal Of Fortune.
DERSHOWITZ: “You are a very strange man.” BÜLOW: “You have no idea.”
Along with Iron’s win, the Academy Awards peers nominated Schroeder for director and Kazan (Elia’s son) for his Screenplay. Box office in North America was $15,445,131, marking exhibit #79 on the 1990 docket, which also arraigned the nail-biter Presumed Innocent.
111 minutes, with Annabella Sciorra, Fisher Stevens (playing someone almost as smugly venal as Dershowitz), Christine Baranski (as Andrea Reynolds, another let’em eat cake crumbs type), Jack Gilpin, Felicity Huffman, Uta Hagen (Sunny’s maid, who once worked for the Krupps), Julie Hagerty (as Alexandra Isles, a Claus mistress), Stephen Mailer (Norman Mailer’s son, playing Dershowitz’s son Elon, who was a co-producer on the film: cozy), LisaGay Hanilton and Bill Camp (25, debut).
* Verdicts—Claus and Sunny occupy some other circle now, but their kith rule on. The Newport apportioned fortunes have since been cosmically surpassed by the upstart tech gods, who promise a brave new world. After some discomfort. At last, the wealth will be shared. Technically.
Curiouser & curiouser—Schroeder: “it deals with evil. Ever since I made the movie ‘Idi Amin’, it has been one of my concentrations . . . Aaaah, the thing is that we don’t really know where the evil is. Evil is omnipresent, it’s everywhere. There are all kinds of possible evils, all kinds of hypotheses. Did he do it or did the children frame him? And is this man evil, or is it evil to let an evil man go free?” Continuing his rabbit hole delves, Schroeder tracked crime scenarios thru Single White Female, Kiss Of Death, Desperate Measures, Before And After, Murder By Numbers and Inju: The Beast In The Shadow.
Writ—Kazan: “Working on the script was a nightmare from a legal standpoint, because the assumption is everyone’s going to come out of the woodwork, everyone is going to sue, and a lot of the people who are going to sue are very rich. Every time there was a revision we had to go to the lawyers. If an actor had a problem with a line, you’d rewrite the line and go the lawyers, then the lawyers would send it to the insurance agent.”
Landing the gentry—Glenn Close shot her scenes in 21 days. She was paid one million dollars per week.
Irons: “I became an actor to be a rogue and vagabond, so I don’t think the establishment would be able to welcome me as one of its own – because I’m not.” Back in 2008, in a study commissioned by Post Office Telecoms, linguist Andrew Linn and sound engineer Shannon Harris, in a sample of 50 voices found “the perfect [male] voice” to be a combination of Irons’s and Alan Rickman’s. Speaking at 200 words per minute and pausing for 1.2 seconds between sentences, Irons came very close to the ideal voice model. Linn commented “As humans we instinctively know which voices send shivers down our spine and which make us shudder with disgust.”
** Dershowitz Greatest Hits—Leona Helmsley (“We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes”), Mike Tyson (brutal rapist), Jim Bakker (God-blessed fraudster), O.J. Simpson (double slaughterer), Harvey Weinstein (pig on ice), Herr Trump (2020 impeachment), Don Hairleone’s best bud Jeffrey Epstein (fiend for the ages). P.S. Dear Scaly Justice, summon Alan on Gaza, because “I’m not a hired gun. I’ve got to feel there’s some moral or constitutional issue at stake.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1985/08/vonbulow198508
