July 27, 2016 - Old Yorker

Reversal of Fortune

July 27, 2016 Old YorkerFilm review

Barbet Schroeder (1990)

In the USA of the early 1980s, the von Bülow case became, through daily television coverage of Claus von Bülow’s trial and retrials, a fully-developed soap opera. If you feel that a screen dramatisation of the story so soon afterwards is redundant, Barbet Schroeder’s chilly, desultory film – with a screenplay by Nicholas Kazan, based on the book Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case by Alan Dershowitz – will hardly change your mind. The von Bülows’ relationship is presented in fragmented flashback. This is interrupted (or that’s how it feels) by the story of how Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor and famous courtroom champion of the underprivileged, accepts the brief for, conducts and wins Claus von Bülow’s appeal against the guilty verdict brought in by the jury at his trial for the murder of his wife, Sunny. The prosecution claimed that her husband injected Sunny with an overdose of insulin, with a view to inheriting her large fortune. (Claus was, in this exceedingly moneyed partnership, much less well off than his wife.) This half of the picture is simply tedious: as Dershowitz, Ron Silver gives a hectic yet somehow lifeless performance; his eager, team-spirited student helpers are law school Kids from Fame. Towards the end, the film drifts on to a sequence of alternative explanations for how Sunny fell into a coma[1], without making a choice between the explanations. It has therefore been criticised for, in effect, re-trying Claus and suggesting that he might have been guilty after all. The writer Brian Masters was moved to call this treatment ‘evil’ though Barbet Schroeder’s approach seems too smugly listless to provoke much more than irritation.

As Claus, Jeremy Irons’s polished cartoon of an effete aristocrat is amusing for a while but, once you realise this is all it’s going to be, the contrived mannerisms and voice (something like Edward Fox impersonating Edward Heath) become tiresome. The device of the comatose wife narrating the story is sickly amusing at the start but Glenn Close as Sunny intones her lines with an unvarying cool mystery that also soon wears thin. (You may get to be frustrated too that Sunny is able to speak to us but can’t give any clues as to what happened to her – if you still care.) In her waking moments, Close is the best thing in Reversal of Fortune: she creates a sharp, well-judged portrait of a woman who’s both held together by, and coming apart as a result of, drink and drugs. The most striking images are those describing the uneasy, opulent torpor and isolation of the family’s ‘normal’ life: Sunny’s sad, muted children watching The Crimson Pirate on television; Sunny, in black glasses, dining on a cigarette and ice cream. And, once Schroeder has established this frozen milieu, the further flashback to Claus and Sunny’s first meeting has a charge which comes as a vivid relief: Close and Irons smile warmly, memorably at each other. The film’s depiction of the von Bülows panders to the audience’s (perhaps especially an American audience’s) suspicious curiosity about the idle rich in general and European aristocrats in particular: we may envy the von Bülows so it’s good to see that they’re contemptibly ineffectual. (It’s ironic that the film does even less for poor-boys-made-good like Dershowitz.) This kind of ambivalence could also explain why Irons’s performance has been so overpraised: a posh British actor, using his own theatrical class to expose the vacuousness of possessing social class, may have a special double-edged appeal. The cast also includes Christine Baranski, Julie Hagerty and Uta Hagen.

[1990s]

[1] Afternote: She existed in this vegetative state until her death in 2008.

Parents

July 27, 2016 Old YorkerFilm review

Bob Balaban (1989)

This horror story, set in suburban Massachusetts in the 1950s, derives essentially from the familiar but nonetheless powerful idea that children, as they begin to think about their world, wonder what parents get up to when the kids aren’t around to see. The theme is made clear in an eavesdropping conversation between only child Michael Laemle and Sheila, his sole friend and he daughter of his father’s boss. Their families have just had dinner together and the two sets of parents are now playing cards, with a good deal of meaningful eye contact and body language. ‘What are they doing?’ asks Michael. ‘They’re changing,’ replies Sheila. ‘They change when we’re not here.’ Bob Balaban’s film bears her out: when Michael has gone to bed, his parents not only have sex – they gorge themselves on human flesh in order to get turned on. The script (by Christopher Hawthorne) and direction aren’t shaped imaginatively. Parents would be more compelling if it developed from a description of Michael’s troubled feelings about Mom and Dad’s nocturnal world – a world mysterious to the child but naturally assumed to be normal by a grown-up audience – towards revelation of the horrific particular secret of the Laemle parents, a secret which justifies Michael’s worst fears. If the story were handled in this way, we might at first see Michael as neurotic then be startled out of our complacency. Bob Balaban makes too much too sinister from the start – the wallpaper in the family’s dining room, the lighting there and in Michael’s bedroom and, especially, Randy Quaid, as Michael’s father, Nick. Although she looks as immaculate as her kitchen, even Nick’s wife Lily seems not quite right. She is played by Mary Beth Hurt, an actress who was too android for comfort even when cast as reasonably normal human beings in Interiors and The World According to Garp. Some of the images associate sex and gastronomy but Balaban doesn’t exploit the subversive potential of the material – to present cannibalism as a ghastly extension of copulation. When Michael discovers Mom and Dad having sex, the scene is plainly a red herring (although lit dazzling white: the only red is the blood staining Nick and Lily Laemle’s mouths).

Still, Parents quickly hooks you and holds your attention. Although it’s inevitably nasty, it’s fairly disciplined in its diet of shocking highlights; and if the cannibalisation of Michael’s educational psychologist is hard to stomach (because Sandy Dennis makes of this character a really likeable eccentric), the film’s ending is well judged, illustrating the undying trauma of Michael’s real-life nightmare without trying to cap it and leave you suffocated by horror running rampant. In the daylight sequences, the unreal brightness of the colours vivifies wittily and ominously the emphatic but innocuous palette of domestic movies and commercials of fifties America. (The cinematography is by Ernest Day.) Bryan Madorsky is remarkable and worrying as Michael. Looking like a profoundly glum sibling of the little boy in Mary Poppins, Madorsky both contributes to the audience’s unease and invites our sympathy. Sheila tells him she’s from the moon (and will return there once she’s completed her education) but it’s Michael whose look is so wan and alienated that he might be an extraterrestrial. It’s as if his parents’ unusual habits have begun to dehumanise their child physically yet Michael retains a capacity for emotional suffering: this is an odd, engaging combination. And Mary Beth Hurt’s mannered, artificial quality gets to be increasingly right in her role here: her deep throaty giggle, which offsets a tinny voice and neat, tight gestures, amusingly and eerily suggests Michael’s mother’s guilty secret. The physical and sensual contrasts supplied by Hurt, Juno Mills-Cockell (Sheila) and Deborah Rush (Sheila’s mother) give a peculiar, surprising edge to the Oedipal aspect of Parents: the young girl is the most maternal presence while Hurt’s pristine, almost zombified girlishness often makes her seem more like a sister to Michael than a mother. Even in his clean white shirts, Randy Quaid’s paterfamilias looks bestial and to belong to a different species from either his wife or his child. Mary Beth Hurt’s physical kinship with her son has the effect of making Mom’s corruption by Dad all the more horrifying to Michael – and poignant to the audience.

[1990s]