Timing isn’t everything for deciding on the release date of a new movie, but even so when the producers planned the launch of Denial they could have no inkling that the whole of the world’s media would be totally fixated with a U.S. Presidential Election with a Republican Candidate whose behavior bears more than a passing resemblance to David Irving who denied the very existence of the Holocaust.
The movie is based on a very real story that started in 1996 when the right-wing British author and historian David Irving (Timothy Spall) filed a libel suit against a Jewish-American history professor Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) and her British publisher Penguin Books for publishing a British edition of Lipstadt’s book ‘Denying the Holocaust’. In her book Lipstadt called Irving a Holocaust denier, falsifier, and bigot, and said that he manipulated and distorted real documents.
The reason Irving chose to take action in England was because under British libel laws it is the duty of the defendant to prove that they are right, and not the other way round as in the US. Therefore Lipstadt was faced with enormous task of actually proving that the Holocaust existed.
Over in London, this native of Queens was like a fish out of water dealing with a rather pedantic cumbersome legal system that insists that she has to have two levels of lawyer. She instructs a solicitor (Andrew Scott) whose claim to fame was that he had just represented the Princess of Wales in her divorce case. Whilst he would run the case for the defense, he would will not actually represent Lipstadt in Court as that would be done by Richard Rampton a bewigged barrister (Tom Wilkinson).
Filmmaker Mick Jackson was faced with the tough task of making a compelling movie that is all about a Trial where the outcome is well known from the outset. He is not helped by the fact that the defense team decide not to let either the highly-emotional Lisptadt, or any of the Holocaust survivors testify in Court. Their reasoning was that as Irving had elected to conduct his own case without any legal representation, he would use the opportunity to grandstand and even bully the elderly witnesses in the hope of confusing them, and causing the Judge to doubt their reliability.
This created problems for David Hare the screenwriter who was left with little more than the daily conferences after Court recessed with Lisptadt and her legal team where even then they were loath to detail any of their strategy. It all made for a very heavy going and lack-luster movie even with its a-list cast.
The one redeeming scene in this well meaning drama is when Rampton insists that Lisptadt accompanies him to Auschwitz and seeing them there in this stark forbidding place where so many people were so brutally killed, suddenly brings you up sharp as to what really is at stake at the heart of the matter. Beautifully filmed by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, it certainly adds to the extremely emotional draw of the subject, and will probably make audiences give the movie a higher regard than it deserves.
Spall and Wilkinson as the two combatants in court are pitch perfect, but Wiesz seems unusually uneasy with her role. Maybe it’s because of her strained monotone Queens accent or her red curly unkempt hair.
When the Trial is totally over and Irving has been totally exposed as a liar, he is seen appearing on a TV chat show , this time he is even denying that he lost the Court Case. Eerily reminiscent of the irrational and uncontrollable behavior of a certain Presidential candidate .
Labels: 2016, drama, dramatized real-life
