The facts in the case of Claus von Bülow, convicted of murdering his wife but later acquitted in a headline-grabbing re-trial, are filtered through a European sense of irony into a portrait of icy upper-crust alienation and detachment. The film itself is no less aloof than its subject, favoring the legal technicalities of the case over its moral implications (the team of legal eagles defending the accused killer even wear nifty self-promotional t-shirts), and contrasting the upper class ice of von Bülow to the blue-collar fire of his lawyer (Ron Silver). Jeremy Irons gives a pitch-perfect reading of his character's cold, careless life of privilege, while Glenn Close plays the ill-fated Sunny von Bülow as a somewhat more pathetic variation of her psycho role in 'Fatal Attraction'. Her clumsy death-bed voice-over narration is an awkward attempt to balance the scales of justice, but in the end both the film and the legal case favor the defendant, with ace attorney Silver presenting his client as a public scapegoat for daring to fulfill every henpecked husband's darkest fantasy. In which case the film itself has to be regarded as the same browbeaten husband's perfect daydream of legal vindication.
Review of Reversal of Fortune
