Schroeder’s Look at Von Bulow Story Is Peak of Telluride Fest

This small former gold-mining town high in the Rockies is reeling from an unsolved murder case involving one of the heirs to the U-Haul fortune, shot in her bed last month by someone police believe was a hired killer. Media have been flocking from around the country to cover the case, the lurid allure heightened by a slew of feuding, wealthy relatives.

How appropriate, then, that the most eagerly awaited picture in the 17th Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend dramatized one of the most famous attempted murder cases of the ‘80s: what happened to Sunny Von Bulow.

Director Barbet Schroeder’s “Reversal of Fortune” was anticipated with curiosity partly because it was being seen for the first time anywhere (many of the other films had popped up at Cannes) and partly because no one knew whether Schroeder’s recounting of the charges against Claus Von Bulow, who was ultimately acquitted of the attempted murder of his society wife, would be a legal melodrama or some sort of satire.

In the new issue of Premiere magazine, handed out here, “Reversal” is called a “a fact-based courtroom drama,” but described in the official festival program as “the year’s most unexpected comedy . . . Lubitsch with a dash of rat poison.”

The truth, as is often the case in real-life courtroom dramas, lies somewhere in the middle. Audacious is what it is. While adhering closely to the facts, “Reversal of Fortune” veers skillfully down the freeways of both comedy and tragedy at a brisk, suspenseful and not excessively reverent clip.

Not the least of its conceits is the voice-over narration by comatose Sunny Von Bulow (Glenn Close), who--like William Holden’s dead screenwriter in “Sunset Boulevard”--omnisciently introduces story elements while not quite of this world.

Schroeder himself isn’t sure where the film fits between comedy and docudrama. “I’m very happy and flattered about having it described as ‘Lubitsch with a touch of rat poison,’ ” he said after a “Reversal” screening. “But of course, that doesn’t apply to the whole movie.

“It applies especially to Von Bulow in the present, but there’s a section that is really the emotional center of the film, around the character played by Glenn Close. I don’t think the comedy applies there, and maybe it doesn’t apply either to a third side of the movie, which is the quasi-documentary approach of the legal work. I shot the film in three different styles.”

But if the film has to have a genre label, Schroeder says he prefers comedy to courtroom drama.

“Our mission was to make it anti-courtroom,” he said. “Courtroom is very minimal in the movie. One of the sides of the movie is to show the role of the lawyer outside the courtroom and the detective work you never see in movies.”

The filmmaker is prepared for the possibility that he might be taken to court himself for his deliberately ambiguous retelling. “There were 10 lawyers examining every single line in the script,” Schroeder said, “to make sure that we were not going to have a lawsuit that (the real-life protagonists) could win. Because lawsuits, we’re going to have plenty, and we had to have superinsurance--very expensive.”

Schroeder seemed pleased at the polarization of viewers leaving the theater, with some proclaiming Von Bulow’s obvious guilt and others finding the character clearly innocent, at least of attempted murder.

“That is great!” he said, as the audience proved itself a hung jury. “That is great!”

Strong favorites among festivalgoers this year included Bertrand Tavernier’s “Daddy Nostalgia,” Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Everybody’s Fine,” Michael Verhoeven’s “The Nasty Girl” and Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” which stars Gerard Depardieu, who was on hand for a personal tribute.

Earning controversy, on the other hand, were “White Hunter, Black Heart,” from Clint Eastwood (also honored with a tribute); the civil-rights drama “The Long Walk Home,” starring Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg; and Paul Schrader’s lushly photographed but sordid “The Comfort of Strangers.”