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.
