Barbet Schroder's Reversal of Fortune is a member of an impromptu genre of film which I like to refer to as New England Dramas. New England Dramas are basically films which are usually, although not always, set in New England that focus on the problems of well-to-do, middle-to-upper class white people. You know...films like Children of a Lesser God, In the Bedroom, On Golden Pond, etc, etc. They usually feature very pretty cinematography, gentle piano background music, and a strange proclivity to take place during autumn. My problem with New England Dramas is that by and large the well-to-do, middle-to-upper class white people that they feature are terribly dull and uninteresting. And so it is with the main characters in Reversal of Fortune. At least, two out of three of them. The first two are Sunny von Bülow and Claus von Bülow, a pair of excruciatingly boring socialites who spend their days drinking, popping pills, and sleeping. At least, they did until Sunny von Bülow fell into a bizarre coma which left her brain dead. Claus von Bülow was then famously accused and convicted in real life of attempting to murder her by giving her an overdose of insulin. Reversal of Fortune comes in right after these events and details Claus' attempts to overturn his conviction in an appeal with the help of law professor Alan Dershowitz. The scenes with Dershowitz, played by a marvelous Ron Silver, are full of fast, witty dialogue and move with the brisk pace of a film that knows that it has a lot of story to tell and only two hours in which to do it. And then comes Jeremy Irons as Claus von Bülow. I am a huge fan of Jeremy Irons, in no small part due to his performance as Scar in The Lion King, the very first film that I ever saw as a child in a movie theater. But here in Reversal of Fortune he talks like he has a mouth full of Novocaine and therefore must over-stretch his jaws in order to properly pronounce his words. His vowels are somehow sharper than his consonants...figure THAT out...The fact that Irons won the Academy Award for Best Actor and Silver wasn't even nominated irks the hell out of me. Oh, this is an interesting film when it focuses on the nuts and bolts of Claus' case. But, like a dour specter, Irons glowers over this film, serving only to remind me why I can't stand New England Dramas in the first place.
7/10
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