Getting off

Reversal of Fortune 1990 U.S. (112 minutes) directed by Barbet Schroeder, written by Nicholas Kazan, based on the book by Alan Dershowitz.

A darkly glib titled European convicted of trying to murder his American socialite wife hires a brilliant, passionate and media-loving lawyer to clear his name.

This entertaining feature film based on the Claus von Bülow case makes legal research sexy and comes with a moral which underlines the touchstone of the American criminal justice system: everyone gets a defense. 

The victim, Martha ‘Sunny’ von Bülow (Glenn Close), is an extremely wealthy and spoiled American socialite who chronically abused drugs and alcohol.

The defendant, her husband Claus von Bülow (Jeremy Irons), is a charming German with a title, a great deal less money than his wife, and a stygian sense of humor. Irons received a Best Actor Oscar and a Golden Globe Award for his role.

The defense attorney, Alan M. Dershowitz (a schlubbed down Ron Silver), is a brilliant legal practitioner who, self-deprecating in manner, knows damn well in his heart of Harvard Law School hearts that the criminal justice sun rises and sets on him. This may be an occupational hazard.

In other words—and to paraphrase Minnie (Felicity Huffman), one of the movie’s law students involved in the case—everyone’s a stinker.

The defendant probably ‘did it’; nobody liked the smug rich bastard to begin with. But the court blew it. Vindictive family members hired a private investigator and fed the state prejudicially selective evidence upon which its prosecution relied.

This is the thing that Dershowitz, through gritted teeth, tells his law students ‘really pisses me off,’ because regardless of who this defendant happened to be his prosecution unfairly prejudiced the trial outcome.

‘It’s the basis of the whole legal system. Everyone gets a defense. So the system is there for the one innocent person who is falsely accused,’ Dershowitz says.

The case is The State of Rhode Island v. Claus von Bülow. Made for the tabloids, it produced a pair of high profile trials in a decade of glitter and excess.

Sunny van Bülow inexplicably went into a coma in her Newport, Rhode Island, ‘cottage’ Clarendon Court just before Christmas 1980. This event turned out to be ‘suspiciously’ similar to an incident that happened almost exactly a year before from which she recovered. Insulin was the suspected substance—and alleged link.

In the first trial, a Rhode Island jury found von Bülow guilty on two counts of attempting to murder his wife by insulin injection. The state supreme court vacated von Bülow’s guilty verdict and thirty-year sentence, sending the case back to a new jury which subsequently acquitted him.

Sunny von Bülow remained in a coma for 28 years, from the time the second incident occurred until her death in December 2008. Close’s character, who gets the first and last word, often speaks reflectively from beyond in a voiceover.

Since the movie is based on a lawyer’s book, it loses a lot of the celebrity frisson that surrounded the case as one of the 1980s ‘trials of the decade.’

Dershowitz came into the case when von Bülow hired him to appeal the first verdict. The screenplay by Nicholas Kazan, structured on the issues Dershowitz argued before the Rhode Island Supreme Court, dramatizes the case from court records and trial transcripts as Dershowitz, his law students and lawyers working with him research, argue and shape their appeal.

But all work and no play would make Alan’s a dull story.

The leaven that makes this rich play rise and shine is the odd couple at its center: Irons’ coolly sharp and sardonic Old World patrician, and Silver’s energetic, inspired lawyer whose smarts compete bodily with his New York chutzpah.

The character Dershowitz is as nonplussed by von Bülow’s Newport-Upper East Side world of opulent privilege as is von Bülow by Dershowitz’s democratic, communal life in Cambridge among his students. The film has fun playing these contrasts. There also is a hint of the [anti-Semitic] high and mighty hiring ‘the Jew’ to ‘get Von Bülow off,’ while Dershowitz struggles not to see a ‘Hitla’ in the haughty German.

‘Is he the devil?’ Dershowitz wonders. ‘If so, can the devil get justice? And all this legal activity, is this in Satan’s service?’

But von Bülow, incidentally also trained as a lawyer, gets the best lines.

While first discussing the case with his client over ‘a proper lunch at Delmonico’s’ (where von Bülow points out that Dershowitz’s star power got them a better table than his elite social connections ever did) Dershowitz notes that von Bülow has one thing in his favor.

‘What’s that?’

‘Everyone hates you.’

‘Well, that’s a start,’ von Bülow replies, not missing a beat.

Later, when first meeting Dershowitz’s highly skeptical law students, von Bülow tries to break the ice with light humor:

‘What do you give a wife who has everything?’ he deadpans, pausing to regard the curious young faces: ‘An injection of insulin.’

Uh-huh…

Irons, Silver and Close inhabit their roles so convincingly that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that these were actors playing living people less than a decade after the events occurred.

Maybe the best ingredient of Irons’ role is his character’s guardedness. In preparing and playing the role Irons said he got a sense about what really happened; but his von Bülow is an enigma. It is hard to know what he thinks or feels about anything.

Irons, who said he once met von Bülow through a mutual friend, noted in an interview that von Bülow had objected to details of his portrayal and groused that he is much better known to the world from Irons’ character than who he is himself.   

Who were these people, then, and what really did happen?

In Sunny’s words, ‘If you could just go back in time and take a peek, you’d know. And all this would be unnecessary. Then again, everyone enjoys a circus.’