Reversal of Fortune (1990)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Reversal of Fortune is a less than thrilling, less than mysterious murder-mystery film. In isolation from the true story that inspired it, it holds very low impact and has not aged well in 25 years.Ron Silver is the film's strongest asset as Alan Dershowitz. He is the one who should have eaten up the accolades, not Jeremy Irons. His long philosophical rants are brilliant and gives us a very good understanding of Dershowitz as a thinker and a person in only a brief window of time. Glenn Close is also very impressive, shining in a very simple role. As for Irons, he has his moments - a smile here, a look there - that convey his talent, but for the overwhelming majority of time he isn't more than just a British gentleman. His performance in Eragon was more compelling than this. He is neither nuanced, nor malevolent, nary a shade on Primal Fear's Aaron Stampler or The Lincoln Lawyer's Louis Roulet. He is as dry as a bone, and to think that this film took the Academy Award for Best Actor which could have instead gone to James Caan for Misery or Ray Liotta for Goodfellas (neither of whom was even nominated) is just plain bizarre.The film is fairly predictable and unfolds pretty much as you'd think. It cuts away from the most exciting moments (the courtroom scenes) and even teases us with a far more exciting story (the two black brothers on death row).There's a fair bit of watchability here, which salvages an all right score, but there's a plethora of better films of this nature out there, and you should go an see them first.

When a rich but difficult-to-live-with woman turns up in a coma, suspicions naturally fall upon her someone sinister spouse. But even a guilty man deserves a fair trial, or so a committed legal scholar believes in a film about skewed viewpoints that plays with our own point of view.First-billed actor Glenn Close plays Sunny von Bülow in a bed for much of the film, either laid out in a druggy haze or in a full-fledged coma from which she tells us she won't emerge. That leaves Ron Silver as legal eagle Alan Dershowitz handling most of the action arranging a fresh defense for convicted murderer Claus von Bülow, whom Jeremy Irons plays with slick tragi-comic flair."Let the chips fall where they may!" he tells Dershowitz when warned about the perils of seeking out the truth."That's what an innocent man would say," a skeptical Dersh replies."I know," says smug Claus with a lazy pull at his cigarette. Is he sincere, or playing a part?Director Barbet Schroeder seems to have a thing about the tricky ground where power and morality meet: He made his name with a documentary of dictator Idi Amin that came in two versions, a friendlier one for Amin's domestic distribution in Uganda and a less guarded version for international distribution. Here he seems to enjoy his proximity to another devil, albeit one who may be innocent after all.We certainly root for Claus, mainly because Irons plays him in a way that makes him an underdog, whether against the legal system or Dershowitz's team of young lawyers who mock him about his sex life. "We can't all be like you," he tells Dershowitz after the latter goes off on him for his lack of apparent concern about his vegetative wife, and there's a trace of real feeling in his line reading.He seems less a cold-blooded killer than the emotionally-stunted product of a rich society, in a way not much different from poor Sunny. She wants to lie in bed smoking and pill-popping while he wants a career, not to mention a little time with a pretty soap-opera actress. "You marry me for my money, then you demand to work," she huffs. "You're the prince of perversion."We are encouraged to see him that way, too, although not necessarily a criminal one. He lives a life so far removed from normal human interaction and concerns that he seems to enjoy his little jests even if no one else can - except the audience, which makes us a little perverse, too."Reversal Of Fortune" has a lot of great moments, but plenty of duff ones, too. There's a subplot about a sleazy gadabout played with zest by Fisher Stevens that never gels with the main story, and neither does an attempt at shoehorning some romance for Dershowitz with one of his assistants. Nicholas Kazan delivers a smart script but does get stuck in the weeds trying to get across a good deal of information.Silver is great though, giving pound for pound the film's best performance even if Close is first-billed and Irons won the Best Actor Oscar. You need a center for a film like this, and someone who's morally grounded, but Dershowitz is presented as that here only in a relative sense. He not only takes Claus's case despite his belief of his guilt, but can even joke about wanting to defend Hitler in a court of law, just so he can kill him after by himself.Is Dershowitz the film's real prince of perversion? Schroeder and crew aren't saying, but you can tell they're having fun making you think.

After seeing the previews, you can never get Jeremy Iron's voice out of your head, when he replies to a question with "you have no idea".Very effective narration by the great Glenn Close. His children also some into play, as well as the man playing Allen Dershewitz, and his whole legal team.Yes, you know he'll be acquitted but the telling takes the entire movie. I haven't seen it in many years, but parts of it just don't leave your memory. I do think that Sunny Von Bulow was a very troubled soul. Perhaps troubled by having too much money and everything she wanted for the asking.You've got to have the TIME to see the whole movie and appreciate its many twists and turns. But well worth the effort. And well worth seeing Jeremy Irons nail the part.

On 27 December 1979, the millionaire Sunny von Bülow (Glenn Close) is found in coma for the second time in her bathroom with an overdose of insulin. Her European husband Claus von Bülow (Jeremy Irons) is convicted for attempted murder of Sunny, but he hires the expensive Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver) to revert his sentence. Dershowitz teams up with his students to collect evidences to disprove the accusation and prove the innocence of Claus. "Reversal of Fortune" is the dramatization of a true story based on the book of Alan M. Dershowitz. The originality of the screenplay is that it details the work of Dershowitz and his students to disprove the prosecution and the trial itself is just glanced. I do not like this type of inconclusive films based on true stories since the truth is not disclosed. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "O Reverso da Fortuna" ("The Reversal of the Fortune")