Reversal of Fortune

Sunny von Bülow falls into a coma at their Rhode Island mansion and never wakes. Her husband Claus is convicted of giving her an insulin overdose. He goes to the lawyer Alan Dershowitz for the appeal. Dershowitz thinks he is guilty and takes the case anyway. The subject is not the crime but the defence itself. Dershowitz tells the team he builds from his students that what they are looking for is not the truth but whether the evidence is sufficient. The film keeps the same distance and never says what Claus did. The form rests on a strange choice of narrator: the story is told by Sunny, in her coma. A voice that comments on its own case and can never answer. The source is Dershowitz's own book, so the defence we watch is the version told by the man who mounted it. Jeremy Irons won the best actor Oscar for the role; Glenn Close plays Sunny and Ron Silver plays Dershowitz. Barbet Schroeder directs. Who it is for: viewers who like legal drama and narratives that leave guilt undecided. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to learn who did what; the film withholds the answer and defends withholding it as a position.