Review

Film's parts greater than the sum

The easiest thing to say about Denial is that it is a courtroom thriller based on the actual case detailed in historian Deborah Lipstadt's 2005 memoir History on Trial: My Day in Court With a Holocaust Denier. It is a serious and well-intentioned movie that takes great pains to present things as they could have been.

It's like a work of history itself -- all the courtroom dialogue in the film is taken directly from the court transcript and all the words uttered by the designated villain, British writer David Irving (Timothy Spall), are taken directly from Irving's writings, speeches and statements in court. In other words, it strives toward the sort of neutrality that journalists and others often mistakenly call "objective."

Denial

86 Cast: Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott

Director: Mick Jackson

Rating: PG-13, for thematic material and brief strong language

Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

This is probably an honorable mistake, for some people are likely to perceive Denial as inert. I didn't, but then I'm fairly interested in Lipstadt's work and Irving's revisionism. Some background: Irving achieved some popularity in the 1960s with a series of controversial books about the war -- one of which was pulled from publication after one of its subjects won a libel suit against Irving. In 1977 he published Hitler's War, a remarkable book that looked at the second World War from the perspective of Adolf Hitler and argued that Der Fuhrer was a reasonable and intelligent politician who had no knowledge of the Final Solution that was being prosecuted by his SS head Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich. Furthermore, Irving also argued Great Britain was mainly responsible for the war, and that Hitler had been slandered by journalists and historians.

Meanwhile, Lipstadt was an American historian specializing in the Holocaust. In her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, she identified Irving as a "Holocaust denier," as she traced the growth of the movement (which she characterized as a "purely anti-Semitic diatribe" based on pseudo-history) from the lunatic fringe to a near-critical mass of believers that seemed likely to grow more influential as Holocaust deniers died off.

Mick Jackson's film begins in 1996, with a provocative Irving showing up at Atlanta's Emory University with a video camera-toting associate to heckle Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz, sporting a red wig and a well-tuned Queens accent) as she teaches her history class. Irving offers $1,000 to anyone who can produce a document proving the Nazis gassed Jews at Auschwitz. (A fool's errand given how scrupulously the Nazis covered their genocidal tracks.)

While Lipstadt is determined not to credit Irving and his ilk by engaging them -- "I will not debate you, not here, not now, not ever," she tells her bushwhacker -- she soon finds she has no choice: Irving has sued her and her publisher for libel.

Had he filed the suit in the United States, this might have amounted to just a minor nuisance -- it would have likely been dismissed out-of-hand given that Irving was arguably a public figure and that he would have to prove not only that Lipstadt's perfectly reasonable assertions were false, but that she had acted with malice. But Irving, who'd perhaps learned from being sued himself, opted to file the suit in England, where libel law puts the burden of proof on the defendant. In essence, Lipstadt was charged with proving that the Holocaust occurred.

While that might seem like the basis for scintillating theater, Jackson and screenwriter David Hare decide to stick to the facts rather than inventing a reversal of fortune in a tense jury trial. As admirable as that is, it's not especially dramatic. It's hard to imagine that any judge would have credited Irving's argument that the Nazis never gassed anyone and the defense mounted by Lipstadt's lawyers -- her solicitor Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott) and barrister Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) -- is basically sort of a legal rope-a-dope. They don't call the fiery Lipstadt to testify, they don't call any Holocaust survivors to describe their experience of the camps. They rely on the egotist (and probably disturbed) Irving to hang himself.

And while we can respect this safe method -- the title is a multi-edged blade, referring to Irving's denial of the historical record, Lipstadt's necessary denial of her own voice to achieve a greater good and the denial of respectability to odious fictions -- the truth is the film seems a good bit smaller than it ought to. In an age where it's possible to find validation for any crackpot theory, we might expect Denial to resonate more. Instead, it comes off as a showcase for (the ever-brilliant) Spall, who invests the gadfly Irving with a dangerous charge of charm, and Wilkinson, whose fierce Rampton is the closest thing to a traditional courtroom hero.

Weisz turns in excellent work too, though it turns out that the movie -- like the trial -- isn't really about the combative Lipstadt.

Still, this is an admirable, sober work that treats the audience like grown-ups, and even offers a moment or two of poetry. But it is more useful journalism than transformative art and one has to wonder if the material wouldn't be better served in a stage play.

Or, here's a thought, maybe in a book.

MovieStyle on 10/21/2016

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