Reversal of Fortune (1990)

Great performance from Jeremy Irons, well deserving of his Best Actor Academy Award, kind of is a letdown as both a legal and character drama. Some nice moments and solid performances from everyone but not sure I'll remember this one down the road. **3.5/5**

Quite why Jeremy Irons won an Oscar for this performance is anyone's guess. Though it is certainly one of his better efforts, he still comes across as remarkably wooden and un-engaging. His character - Klaus von Bulow - has just been convicted of attempting to marry his wealthy, socialite, wife Sonny (Glenn Close) by injecting her with drugs and leaving her to freeze to death on the bathroom floor (odd how they've got $14 million in the bank but never turn the central heating on!). Anyway, now she is lying in a coma and he is desperate so engages the services - at $300 a day, no less - of law professor Alan Dershowitz (upon whose book this is all based) to lead his appeal. It's history this, so if you're across the story then you will already know how it all pans out. Therefore what we are left with is a decent effort from Ron Silver as the tenacious lawyer, some almost ethereal contributions from Close as the occasionally animated corpse/narrator and the frankly underwhelming Irons. It's an interesting look at the drug-fuelled existence of the rich and famous and possibly not the best extolment of the state of marriage but somehow the whole thing is just a bit sterile, lacking, dry...

"Reversal of Fortune" is as satisfyingly complex and utterly fascinating as any murder mystery you might encounter. It successfully establishes the viewpoint of what might be considered a curious bystander and it just observes. It neither exonerates nor does it condemn Claus Von Bulow (it wisely leaves this task to the courts) and it draws no specific conclusions at all regarding the facts and the general minutiae at the very heart of the case (this is for each member of the audience to do) and it remains just as difficult at the end of the film as it was in the beginning to make any sort of well reasoned determination not directly influenced by the perceptions of the media about this particular situation. It is also difficult to gauge innocence or guilt during the course of this extraordinarily compulsive and engrossing drama which makes for absolutely compelling viewing throughout.