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Reversal of FortuneThey say the dead don't talk, but then neither do people in irreversible comas. Which is why director Barbet Schroeder takes such a risk in his account of the Claus von B??low trial, as he has the comatose figure of Sunny von B??low act as the narrator. Fortunately it works, with Close's Sunny an enigmatic figure who seems just as much in the dark as the rest of us. What really happened on 21 December 1980? "You tell me," she says sadly.
The facts of that day and its aftermath were this: when Sunny fell into a coma, her children by her first marriage, Alex and Ala, amassed enough evidence to convince the police to prosecute her second husband, Claus von B??low, for her attempted murder. After he was convicted, Claus was portrayed in the media as a grasping social climber who was having an affair and tried to kill his wife when she threatened to cut him off. For his appeal, Claus hired Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law Professor on whose subsequent book this film is based.
The heart of the film lies in the relationship between Irons, as von B??low, and Silver as Dershowitz. Both give outstanding performances, with Irons fully deserving his Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the cold, mannered and seemingly unremorseful von B??low. Silver, on the other hand, is a bundle of energy as the tenacious lawyer for whom the letter of the law is more important than his client's innocence or guilt. 'Would he defend Hitler?' he asks himself. Sure.
And in the background there's Sunny, wringing her hands and wondering where it all went so wrong. The official conclusion, of course, is that von B??low is innocent and Sunny's children guilty of cherry-picking the evidence against him. That means the film is not so much a whodunnit as a fascinating study of the super rich at their most amoral, in which no one gets off lightly.
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