Even though the general consensus is that Jeremy Irons won the Oscar as a make-up for Dead Ringers (he even thanked Cronenberg in his speech), he's still great in this. His performance reminds me a lot of Val Kilmer's John Holmes in Wonderland -- the flashbacks are told from a number of different perspectives, and while his Claus is more consistent than Wonderland's Rashomon-lite, Irons is still able to play many different facets of this creepy, odd guy.
The two scenes that stand out to me when it comes to Irons' performance are the scene where Sunny is eviscerating him, that she "already has a butler," and Claus just stands there and takes it. He's not moving, he's not doing a big showy thing. He's very still, letting the heartbreak play across his face, the realization that while he might no longer be in love with Sunny, he never thought she'd fallen out of love with him.
The other one is the ending, which I think is one of the finest, and simplest, depictions of what it means to be "that guy," the high-profile person accused of a crime walking free. It doesn't matter if Claus was found not guilty or not. He'll always be "that guy who tried to murder his wife." (There's a great Dominick Dunne essay about this.) And how does Claus deal with that? He makes a joke, a smirk, in a moment that I found both sad and somewhat exhilarating. Ambiguous, too -- because is Claus choosing to deal with the fact he'll always bee seen as a guilty man with humor and panache, or is it because he has such little remorse that he can make jokes about it? Is he really the Devil, as Sunny describes him, or does the film leave us realizing that we in fact have "no idea" who Claus is?
The rest of the movie's really good, too. Pour one out for Ron Silver, who's really good at playing the moral fluidity of Alan Dershowitz, bouncing from guilty to not guilty to just unsure (which is where the film leaves us), but always aware of how Claus sees him, a little Jew in a world not meant for him -- unless he's needed. And Glenn Close does just as good a job as Irons as playing the various facets of Sunny, Barbet Schroder plays with the variations on Rashomon without ripping off Rashomon (a friend in law school described the film as "showing how alternate theories of the crime are developed"), and the music's very effective.
The two scenes that stand out to me when it comes to Irons' performance are the scene where Sunny is eviscerating him, that she "already has a butler," and Claus just stands there and takes it. He's not moving, he's not doing a big showy thing. He's very still, letting the heartbreak play across his face, the realization that while he might no longer be in love with Sunny, he never thought she'd fallen out of love with him.
The other one is the ending, which I think is one of the finest, and simplest, depictions of what it means to be "that guy," the high-profile person accused of a crime walking free. It doesn't matter if Claus was found not guilty or not. He'll always be "that guy who tried to murder his wife." (There's a great Dominick Dunne essay about this.) And how does Claus deal with that? He makes a joke, a smirk, in a moment that I found both sad and somewhat exhilarating. Ambiguous, too -- because is Claus choosing to deal with the fact he'll always bee seen as a guilty man with humor and panache, or is it because he has such little remorse that he can make jokes about it? Is he really the Devil, as Sunny describes him, or does the film leave us realizing that we in fact have "no idea" who Claus is?
The rest of the movie's really good, too. Pour one out for Ron Silver, who's really good at playing the moral fluidity of Alan Dershowitz, bouncing from guilty to not guilty to just unsure (which is where the film leaves us), but always aware of how Claus sees him, a little Jew in a world not meant for him -- unless he's needed. And Glenn Close does just as good a job as Irons as playing the various facets of Sunny, Barbet Schroder plays with the variations on Rashomon without ripping off Rashomon (a friend in law school described the film as "showing how alternate theories of the crime are developed"), and the music's very effective.
