Butler's Cinema Scene

Rachel Weisz as historian Deborah Lipstadt

“DENIAL”  My rating: B

110 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

The arrival of “Denial” could hardly be more timely, given the increased white nationalism encouraged — or at least not denounced — by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Based on historian’s Deborah Lipstadt’s 2005  memoir History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier, Mick Jackson’s film  is a legal drama with repercussions far beyond the courtroom.

In 1997 Holocaust-denying historian David Irving  sued Lipstadt (of Emory University) and her publisher, Penguin Books,  for defaming him  and his theories in  her book Denying the Holocaust.

Irving opted to sue in a British court, choosing that venue rather than one in America at least in part because under British law persons accused of libel must prove their innocence  (in theU.S. it’s the plaintiff who must prove wrongdoing).

Timothy Spall

The resulting film is well acted, informative, and emotional for the quiet contempt it heaps upon anti-Semitism with a scholarly face.

Rachel Weisz portrays Lipstadt with a tightly-wound, steely exterior that periodically bursts into fierce flame.

She first encounters Irving (Timothy Spall) face to face when he shows up at her college lecture and waves $1000 which he’ll give anyone who can prove that any Jew was ever killed in a Nazi gas chamber.

The bulk of the film centers on Lipstadt’s interactions with her British solicitor (the lawyer who will prepare her case) and her barrister (who will argue it in court).  These figures of probity and quiet dignity are portrayed, respectively, by Anthony Scott (best known as Moriarty on the PBS “Sherlock”) and the ever-wonderful Tom Wilkinson.

Part of the team’s preparations involves a trip to Auschwitz (on a eerily beautiful foggy winter’s day), where Lipstadt is moved by the echoes of dead souls but also somewhat perplexed…before the war ended the Germans blew up the gas chambers in an effort to destroy evidence of their crimes.

Tom Wilkinson at Auschwitz

She’s all gung-ho to bring in real Holocaust survivors to describe their experiences (“They want to give voice to the ones who didn’t make it.”)  But her lawyers nix that idea as playing into the plaintiff’s hands.  Irving, who plans on serving as his own attorney, will relish the opportunity to cross examine these now-elderly Jews and jump on any lapse of memory or emotional collapse (how can the court trust the testimony of such damaged individuals?) to throw doubt on the gas chamber scenario.

And Lipstadt is quietly livid that she’s being muzzled by her attorneys while Irving plays the press like a maestro and passes himself off as a supremely reasonable individual.

There are outside influences at play as well.  Well-to-do British Jews want Lipstadt to settle her case out of court. And as publicity about the lawsuit grows, she is advised to vary the route of her morning run through London.  No sense in making herself an easy target for some Nazi sympathizer.

The stiff formality of the court proceedings also pose a problem for the American, who must bite her tongue not to jump up and call out Irving’s assertions.

Spall (who has lost an immense amount of weight in recent years) is horrifyingly sleazy as Irving, who rejects allegations of racism by telling reporters that he has hired many minority nannies for his daughter and that they are “All very attractive girls with  very nice breasts.”  (Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump.)

“Denial” isn’t terribly cinematic or stylish, but that’s not the point. It effectively dramatizes a confusing and complicated situation, pulling in its audience and sending us away with the feeling that this was just one victory in a long war against fascism.

| Robert W. Butler