Reversal of Fortune presents Glenn Close with one of the strangest challenges an actress can face: playing a woman who spends most of the film in a coma. As Sunny von Bülow, the wealthy socialite whose husband, Claus von Bülow, played by Jeremy Irons in an Oscar-winning performance, was accused of trying to murder her with insulin, Close must hold a true-crime story together largely through voice-over narration and a few vivid flashbacks. It is a performance of remarkable control, and it transforms what could have been a cold legal procedural into a haunting meditation on marriage, money, and memory.
The film, directed by Barbet Schroeder from Alan Dershowitz’s book, tells the story of Claus von Bülow’s appeal against his conviction for the attempted murder of his wife. Dershowitz, played by Ron Silver, takes the case not because he believes von Bülow is innocent, but because he believes the trial was flawed. The film is structured as an investigation: Dershowitz and his students sift through evidence, interview witnesses, and reconstruct Sunny’s life. Sunny herself narrates from her coma, with a dry, sardonic wit that is both funny and chilling. She introduces herself, her fortune, her marriages, and her unhappiness, and she leaves the audience to judge her husband for themselves.
Close’s narration is the film’s secret weapon. Her voice is low, wry, and world-weary, the voice of a woman who has seen the inside of high society and found it wanting. She describes parties, houses, and husbands with a mixture of amusement and contempt. She is not a sentimental victim. She is a sharp observer who, even in a coma, seems to be watching the legal circus around her with ironic detachment. That tone prevents the film from becoming a simple whodunit. We are not only asking whether Claus tried to kill Sunny; we are asking what kind of marriage, what kind of wealth, and what kind of loneliness could lead to such an accusation.
A Life in Flashback
In flashbacks, Close plays Sunny as a vibrant, troubled woman: glamorous, funny, addicted, and deeply unhappy in her second marriage. She is a mother, a socialite, and a woman whose fortune makes her both powerful and vulnerable. Close shows Sunny’s charm — her laugh, her ease in a drawing room, her affection for her children — alongside her self-destructiveness. She drinks, she takes pills, she argues with Claus in a marriage that has curdled into mutual contempt. The flashbacks are brief, but Close makes them count. We understand why Sunny’s children love her, why her friends worry about her, and why her husband might have found her exhausting, without ever suggesting that exhaustion justifies murder.
Schroeder directs with a cool, almost clinical eye, matching the legal subject matter. The film’s Rhode Island mansions, with their cold light and empty rooms, become a metaphor for a marriage that looks perfect from outside and is hollow within. Close’s Sunny moves through those rooms like a ghost even before the coma, a woman already disappearing from her own life. That visual idea — Sunny as a presence fading from her own story — is powerful, and Close embodies it without overplaying it. She does not beg for sympathy. She presents the facts of her life, warts and all, and lets the audience decide.
Jeremy Irons’s Claus is a masterpiece of ambiguity: urbane, witty, possibly guilty, possibly innocent, and certainly unlikeable in a fascinating way. Close’s performance is the necessary counterweight. Without Sunny’s voice, Claus would dominate the film and the audience might forget the woman at its centre. With Close narrating, Sunny remains a person, not a case file. Her final narration, reflecting on what happened to her and on the impossibility of ever knowing the full truth, is quietly devastating. She does not offer closure, because the real case offered none. Sunny von Bülow remained in a coma until her death in 2008, and the film honours that unresolved reality rather than inventing a neat ending.
Truth, Law, and Ambiguity
Reversal of Fortune is not a film about a verdict. It is a film about how the law constructs stories from incomplete evidence, and how wealth and charisma can shape those stories. Dershowitz’s team wins the appeal on legal grounds, but the film does not claim that Claus is innocent. It claims only that the prosecution did not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Close’s Sunny, narrating from a place beyond legal argument, reminds us that behind every appeal, every headline, and every clever lawyer, there is a human being who suffered. That reminder is the film’s moral centre, and Close delivers it with a restraint that is more powerful than any courtroom speech.
For Close, the role was a daring choice in a year when she also played Gertrude in Hamlet. The two roles could hardly be more different: Gertrude is vocal, physical, and central to every scene; Sunny is mostly a voice, a memory, and a body in a hospital bed. That Close could make both indelible in the same year is a testament to her range and to her understanding that acting is not only about presence on screen, but about presence in the audience’s mind. Sunny von Bülow stays with viewers long after the credits, not because Close shouts or weeps, but because she whispers, ironically, from a place where no one can answer back.
What stays with the viewer is not the legal argument but Sunny’s voice — wry, tired, and oddly companionable, as if she were telling her story to a friend over a long evening. Close gives that voice a warmth that the film’s cold mansions and courtrooms lack, and in doing so she restores Sunny to the centre of a story that, in real life, often treated her as a footnote. That restoration is the film’s quiet triumph, and Close’s alone.