Feel free to pick and choose — you don’t need to run every question in one sitting, though you will want time at the end to discuss what it means that the most reliable narrator in this story is the woman in the coma, that the lawyer who got Claus von Bülow acquitted wrote the book celebrating his own performance, and that the film based on that book is narrated by Sunny von Bülow from a state she describes as ‘somewhere between living and dying — and I know how that feels.’

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ALAN DERSHOWITZ’S BOOK: THE LAWYER AS AUTHOR OF HIS OWN TRIUMPH
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  1. Reversal of Fortune: The Book and Its Peculiar Authorial Position
    Alan Dershowitz’s 1985 book Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case occupies a peculiar place in the literature of true crime and legal narrative: a defense attorney writes about his own case, celebrating the strategy he devised, the arguments he made, and the verdict he achieved. This makes it simultaneously a legal memoir, a case study in appellate advocacy, and an extended act of self-promotion by one of America’s most prominent and self-regarding legal figures. Dershowitz’s book is a protagonist writing about his own performance — with all the self-presentation that implies, and then some. Did the book feel like a reliable account of the case and its legal strategy, or like a document whose author had very strong reasons to present his own role as decisive, his own reasoning as brilliant, and his own judgment as vindicated?
  2. What Dershowitz’s Book Does and Doesn’t Tell You
    The book’s title is Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case, and the ‘inside’ is significant — Dershowitz gives you the defense team’s perspective, the legal arguments as they were developed, the specific challenge of the appeal, and his own intellectual engagement with the case’s procedural complexity. The book cannot give you certainty about what actually happened in Clarendon Court on the nights Sunny von Bülow fell into her comas. Did Dershowitz’s book feel like it was honest about this limitation — that acquittal is not the same as innocence, that the legal standard of reasonable doubt is not the same as the historical truth of what occurred?
  3. Dershowitz as Character: The Professor Who Likes Being Dershowitz
    One of the book’s distinctive qualities is that Dershowitz is himself a vivid and somewhat self-amused character in it — he enjoys the case, enjoys the legal challenge, enjoys the Harvard Law students he deploys as a research army, enjoys the spectacle of his own performance. Ron Silver plays him in the film with this quality: a man who is brilliant, combative, and thoroughly entertained by his own brilliance. Did Dershowitz’s self-portrait in the book feel like an honest account of a lawyer genuinely engaged by an intellectually difficult case, or like a performance of intellectual enjoyment that the book’s own existence — another platform for Dershowitz to be publicly Dershowitz — slightly undermined?
  4. The Students: The Harvard Law Team and the Democratization of the Defense
    One of the book’s more unusual structural features is the prominent role of Dershowitz’s Harvard Law students, who did much of the investigative and research work that built the appeal. The film gives these students significant screen time, and they serve both as a democratizing element—the defense built not just by a star attorney but by a collective effort—and as a device for explaining the case’s legal complexity to an audience. Did the students’ role in the book feel like a genuine acknowledgment of a collaborative process, or did it feel like Dershowitz giving credit in ways that still left him clearly at the center of the story?

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BARBET SCHROEDER’S FILM: THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR IN THE COMA
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  1. Sunny’s Voiceover: The Film’s Brilliant Formal Choice
    The film’s audacious formal decision is giving the narration to Sunny von Bülow herself, speaking from her coma in Glenn Close’s voice, with the film’s opening line: ‘You are about to see a film based on a true story. This is my body. I will never recover from this coma. I know how it looks.’ This is an extraordinary choice: the least reliable narrator imaginable — a woman in a persistent vegetative state who cannot know what happened, who is the alleged victim, and who is also, in the film’s construction, the story’s most emotionally neutral observer. Did Sunny’s voiceover feel like a formal solution to the problem of an unknowable truth — a way of acknowledging that no version of this story is authoritative — or like a gimmick that the film’s more conventional legal thriller mechanics occasionally undercut?
  2. Jeremy Irons’s Claus von Bülow: The Oscar That Made Ambiguity Glamorous
    Irons won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as Claus von Bülow: Claus is simultaneously charming, reptilian, sardonic, possibly guilty, possibly innocent, and thoroughly entertaining about his own unknowability. Irons plays him as a man who has decided that opacity is his best defense and his best performance, and who delivers the film’s most quoted line — ‘You have no idea’ — with a smile that closes rather than opens the question of what he knows. Did the performance feel like a character study of a specific man in a specific situation, or like Irons finding the ideal register for a film that needed its central figure to be permanently and pleasurably unreadable?
  3. Glenn Close’s Sunny: The Victim as Narrator of Her Own Victimization
    Glenn Close’s performance as Sunny is largely confined to flashbacks — scenes from the marriage, from Clarendon Court, from the social world the von Bülows inhabited — while her voiceover gives the film its narrative structure. This means Close plays two versions of Sunny simultaneously: the living woman in the flashbacks, fragile, dependent, and somewhat difficult, and the disembodied voice in the coma, calm, observational, and gently ironic about her own situation. Did this divided performance feel like a formally coherent way of giving Sunny genuine interiority — more than she might have had as a straightforwardly depicted victim — or like a construct that occasionally felt uncomfortable, the alleged victim made complicit in the ambiguity surrounding her own case?
  4. Ron Silver’s Dershowitz: The Film’s Most Grounded Performance
    Ron Silver plays Dershowitz with a quality of combative intellectual energy that anchors the film’s more formally playful elements — the voiceover, Irons’s opacity, the question of guilt that the film refuses to resolve. Silver’s Dershowitz is recognizably a man who loves argument and is good at it, who isn’t entirely comfortable with his client and says so, and who does his job with the kind of engagement that makes the legal process feel like something more than a formality. Did Silver’s performance feel like an honest portrait of Dershowitz as a figure — the book’s self-portrait translated into something slightly more externally visible — or like a version of Dershowitz that the film, like the book, was slightly too fond of?

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THE QUESTION THE FILM REFUSES TO ANSWER: DID HE DO IT?
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  1. Claus von Bülow: Acquitted, Not Innocent
    Claus von Bülow was convicted at his first trial and acquitted at his second, after Dershowitz’s successful appeal established that the initial evidence had been obtained improperly. Acquittal means the prosecution failed to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt — it does not mean the defendant is innocent, and it says nothing about what actually happened. The film is unusually honest about this distinction, most explicitly in Sunny’s voiceover, which observes that she will never know the truth and that the audience won’t either. Did the film’s refusal to resolve the question of guilt feel like intellectual honesty—an acknowledgment that the legal system answers a different question than the historical one—or like a formal evasion that let the film maintain its pleasurable ambiguity while still giving Claus the most glamorous screen treatment?
  2. The Insulin Question: What the Evidence Actually Shows
    The case against Claus turned on insulin: the prosecution argued that Sunny’s second coma was induced by an insulin injection, that an insulin-coated needle was found in Claus’s bag, and that this established his guilt. Dershowitz’s appeal challenged the admissibility of the needle evidence and raised questions about Sunny’s own insulin use. The film presents both versions of the insulin question without resolving them. Did either the book or the film give you enough of a grasp of the medical evidence to form your own view, or did both versions use the complexity of the toxicological questions to maintain the ambiguity that made the story so compulsively watchable?
  3. The von Bülow Marriage: What the Flashbacks Suggest
    The film’s flashbacks to the von Bülow marriage present Sunny as fragile, dependent on prescription drugs and alcohol, and difficult in ways that complicated the prosecution’s portrait of her as a straightforwardly victimized wife and Claus as her calculating poisoner. Did the flashbacks feel like a genuinely balanced account of a complicated marriage and a complicated woman, or like a defense attorney’s narrative — filtered through Dershowitz’s book, which had every reason to complicate the prosecution’s portrait of Sunny — presented as balanced fact?
  4. The Social World: Newport, Old Money, and the Performance of Respectability
    The film is set in a specific social world — Newport’s old-money aristocracy, vast inherited wealth, the rituals of a class that had been performing its own superiority for generations — and this world is itself part of the story. The von Bülow case fascinated the public partly because it took place in a setting that combined maximum glamour with maximum dysfunction. Did the film give this social world enough critical distance—using Newport’s specific textures to say something about the relationship between wealth and accountability—or did it occasionally become too aesthetically seduced by the world it depicted?

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LEGAL DRAMA AND THE LIMITS OF THE ADVERSARIAL SYSTEM
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  1. The Defense Attorney’s Job: Dershowitz’s Argument About What He Was Doing
    One of the book’s central arguments—and one the film takes seriously—is that Dershowitz’s job was not to determine whether Claus von Bülow was guilty, but to ensure that, if he was, the prosecution proved it properly with legally obtained evidence. This is a standard and defensible account of the defense attorney’s role, but it is also, in a case where the victim is alive and in a coma, a more ethically charged position than usual. Did the film make Dershowitz’s argument about the defense attorney’s role feel convincing — a necessary element of a system that must protect procedural rights even for guilty defendants — or like a professional rationale that the specific circumstances of this case made feel thin?
  2. Legal Truth vs. Historical Truth: The System’s Fundamental Limitation
    Films based on real events grapple with the known-outcome problem — how do you generate suspense when the audience already knows what happened? Reversal of Fortune faces the opposite problem: the outcome is known (acquittal), but what actually happened remains genuinely unknown. This is a different and more interesting formal challenge. Did the film find a satisfying way to live inside this permanent uncertainty—making the unknowability itself the subject rather than a limitation—or did the thriller mechanics of the legal narrative occasionally feel like they were pretending to resolve a question the film’s most honest impulses refused to settle?
  3. The Second Trial: Appeals Court and the Rules of Evidence
    Dershowitz’s book is substantially about appellate procedure — the specific legal arguments that challenged the admissibility of the needle evidence, the constitutional questions about the search that produced it, the craft of appellate advocacy as distinct from trial advocacy. Did the book give you a sufficient understanding of how the appeal worked and why it succeeded, or did the legal complexity occasionally feel like material that required more specialized knowledge than either version assumed its audience had? And did the film manage to make appellate procedure feel dramatically alive — which is considerably harder than making a courtroom feel dramatic?

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PAGE VS. SCREEN: THE LAWYER’S BOOK AND THE DIRECTOR’S FILM
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  1. What Dershowitz’s Book Gives You That the Film Can’t
    The book gives you Dershowitz’s extended account of the legal strategy — the specific arguments, the research process, the team’s intellectual engagement with the case’s procedural complexity — in the kind of detail that a film cannot accommodate without becoming a law school lecture. Name one dimension of the book’s legal account that the film’s necessarily compressed version of the same arguments couldn’t replicate and that you felt as a genuine loss.
  2. What Schroeder’s Film Gave You That the Book Couldn’t
    Name one thing the film achieved that Dershowitz’s prose couldn’t: Sunny’s voiceover as formal solution to an unknowable truth, Irons’s sustained tonal ambiguity, Close’s divided performance, the Newport social world rendered as visual texture, or the specific quality of a film that holds its central question permanently open while still being thoroughly pleasurable to watch. Which cinematic achievement felt most like the film finding something the book hadn’t quite reached?
  3. Dershowitz as Narrator vs. Sunny as Narrator: Whose Version Do You Trust More?
    The book is narrated by the defense attorney who got the acquittal; the film is narrated by the woman in the coma who will never recover. Both are unreliable in different ways: Dershowitz has a professional and personal stake in presenting the version of events that supports his judgment; Sunny literally cannot know what happened. Which narrator did you find more credible, and why? And is there an argument that Sunny’s voiceover — precisely because it so explicitly disclaims certainty — is actually the more honest account of what this story can and cannot tell you?

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OVERALL ADAPTATION VERDICT: REASONABLE DOUBT AS A WAY OF LIFE
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  1. One of the Most Formally Inventive Legal Films: Does the Reputation Hold?
    Reversal of Fortune is not a courtroom thriller in the conventional sense — it refuses resolution, it gives its narrative to a woman in a coma, it makes its defendant glamorously unreadable rather than definitively guilty or innocent. It is formally more interesting than almost any legal film of its era. Does it hold up to that reputation? And is there something about its specific formal choices — Sunny’s voiceover, Irons’s performance, the film’s sustained refusal to resolve its central question — that makes it feel more durable than the many legal thrillers that resolved their ambiguity and were forgotten?
  2. What Each Version Does Best
    One gold star for the book, one for the film. They don’t have to be for the same thing. (Suggested categories: Best Self-Portrait of a Lawyer Who Is Also His Own Most Appreciative Audience; Best Performance of Sustained Ambiguity as a Leading-Man Quality; Best Formal Solution to the Problem of a Narrator Who Cannot Know What Happened; Best Account of What the Adversarial Legal System Actually Does and Doesn’t Determine; Best Film About Old Money That Is Also About What Old Money Buys in a Courtroom.)
  3. Recommend: Read, Watch, or Both?
    If a friend had time for only one version — book or film — which would you send them to first, and why? Would your answer change if they want Dershowitz’s account of how appellate advocacy actually works? If they want Irons’s Oscar performance and Sunny’s voiceover? If they want to form their own view of whether Claus von Bülow did it? And is there a case that the film is the more honest version, because Sunny’s narration explicitly acknowledges what neither Dershowitz’s book nor any subsequent account can tell you — that the truth of what happened in Clarendon Court belongs to two people, one of whom will never speak again and one of whom has very strong reasons to keep smiling?
  4. Final Club Gut Check
    On the dial from ‘straightforward adaptation of a legal memoir’ to ‘a film that took a defense attorney’s self-celebrating account of his own greatest case and made it into a meditation on what legal truth actually is, narrated by the alleged victim from a coma she will never leave,’ where does Reversal of Fortune land? And the question Sunny’s voiceover keeps pressing: if the legal system’s answer is acquittal and the historical truth is permanently unknowable, and if the book celebrating the acquittal was written by the lawyer who achieved it and the film celebrating the book was made with Claus von Bülow’s cooperation — whose story is this, who benefits from the version you’ve been given, and does the woman in the coma get any say?

Use, tweak, or mash these questions as needed — your club, your courtroom.