BEFORE: There's no point in going to sleep tonight, we're leaving for the airport at 5 am, and there's really only one way for me to be awake at 5 am. So I'm all packed, ready to stay up all night and leave first thing. Another film tonight about a rich husband (maybe) killing his wife - you see the connection, right? And Frank Langella from "All Good Things" was also in the 1997 version of "Lolita" with Jeremy Irons (last heard in "The Lion King").
THE PLOT: Wealthy Sunny von Bülow lies brain-dead, husband Claus guilty of attempted murder; but he says he's innocent and hires Alan Dershowitz for his appeal.
AFTER: I felt this one really let me down - I saved it for #1400 because it seemed like an important film, it got a good score on IMDB, won the Best Actor Oscar and it's listed as one of the "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die" (I've now seen 306 of them). But it was just plain boring - mostly it's Alan Dershowitz and his law students, debating the finer points of the appeals process of the Rhode Island courts. Yawn.
The problem is, I think, it's based on a book by Dershowitz, and he was Claus Von Bulow's lawyer for his appeal - the attempt to get his two murder convictions overturned. So, that's the only part of the process that Dershowitz saw - where the much, much more interesting part would have been the murder trials themselves, or the actions leading up to the attempted murder charge.
Oh, we see the nights in question - otherwise they'd have hired Glenn Close to just lie comatose in a bed, and then they really wouldn't be getting their money's worth. The problem is, we see them too many times, and from too many different points of view, and every time another little tidbit of information is revealed, we get to see them yet AGAIN. Another problem - it's all hearsay. At the end of the film, are we any closer to parsing what really happened between Claus and Sunny?
By the film's own admission, even if Claus Von Bulow HAD injected Sunny with insulin, so what? She was on so many other medications, some prescribed and some not, who could even foresee how her body would react? This is a woman who overdosed on aspirin, a quantity that could really only be self-ingested.
I'll admit that I thought that Claus injecting Sunny with insulin was the most logical cause of her coma, but it's not really that cut and dry, is it? If he did that, why would he leave the needle behind? There were plenty of other shady characters who could be held accountable, but you can't hang a criminal trial on convenience, or identifying the most likely party - that's not how our legal system works.
And why make the omniscient comatose patient the narrator of the film, if she's not willing to add any coherent insight? Without that, it just seems like an odd choice.
Anyway, I'm stepping away from the project for the next week and a half - maybe when I come back I'll have a renewed interest in murder cases. God knows after 11 days with me on a boat, my wife may want to suffocate me with a pillow. So if I don't make it back, you're all my witnesses.
Also starring Glenn Close (last heard in "Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil"), Ron Silver (last seen in "Semi-Tough"), Annabella Sciorra (last seen in "Internal Affairs"), Uta Hagen, Fisher Stevens, Christine Baranski (last seen in "Legal Eagles"), Felicity Huffman, Julie Hagerty.
RATING: 3 out of 10 appellate judges
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