Double Crossword
DEFENDING truth is the subject of the compelling courtroom drama Denial, which recounts the sensational lawsuit for libel brought by English historical author and Holocaust denier David Irving against American academic Deborah E Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books.
Her influential work, now retitled Denial: Holocaust History on Trial, is sensitively dramatised by director Mick Jackson and screenwriter David Hare, who choose to stick as close to the real story as possible. Rachel Weisz’s arresting, combative Lipstadt is a role she will be remembered for, while her antagonist, Timothy Spall (Mr Turner), makes a spookily stubborn, thoroughly despicable, but still human Irving.
Denial is a film that makes few missteps and its Holocaust theme can be counted on to draw a variety of audiences. Hare’s screenplay is carefully balanced but not morbidly respectful, allowing many moments of humour to lighten its weighty topic.
This makes the lengthy courtroom hearings interesting, appealing not just to viewers of Claude Lanzmann’s heart-wrenching Shoah documentaries, but to wider audiences as well. Mick Jackson Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott, Jack Lowden, Caren Pistorius, Alex Jennings 7-9 PG 109 minutes
All the dialogue in the courtroom scenes is taken verbatim from the trial records, giving them an almost documentary level of realism.
The film opens with a bang, with Deborah’s 1994 lecture at Emory University in Atlanta, where she teaches Jewish Studies. Her book has just been published and the lecture hall is packed with students. Suddenly a man stands up and identifies himself as Irving, challenging her to debate him on whether the Holocaust ever happened. Lipstadt declines and angrily throws him out, but two years later she receives a letter postmarked England. Irving is suing her for libel on the grounds her book has ruined his career.
Deborah is soon meeting famed British solicitor Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott) who represented Diana, Princess of Wales, in her divorce case. Lipstadt’s introduction to British law offers a foretaste of headaches to come, when Julius tells her that in libel cases the burden of proof is on the defendant, not the plaintiff, as in America.
She still has a choice to settle with Irving out of court, but her conscience is outraged at the idea. Raising money for her defence proves no problem and she flies to London to meet her legal team, who are top in their field. To her surprise, she discovers solicitor Julius will be preparing the case but not defending her; that task falls to noted barrister Richard Rampton, roundly portrayed by Tom Wilkinson as a hard-drinking, hardhitting libel lawyer, whose eloquence on the floor is a showstopper. Though Deborah takes a long time to understand him, his brilliant concentration and towering anger overturn her ideas about him.
Another surprise is that Irving has foregone legal representation and will be defending himself.
The historical significance of the case makes it essential for Lipstadt to win and the only way to do that is to follow the strategy of her legal team, which becomes the central drama in the film. With her American directness, Lipstadt is a fish out of water in London, where her expectations about how the trial will be conducted are continually frustrated. The attorneys she is learning to respect insist neither she nor any Holocaust survivor take the stand. Their reasoning is that the case has to focus on Irving’s deliberate lies and distortions and they must give him no chance to distract attention by attacking and humiliating witnesses.
Howard Shore’s moving but subdued music is an example of sensitive and restrained tech work. Another is Haris Zambarloukos’s cinematography. When the film shifts to the Auschwitz concentration camp, the scene is blanketed in thick fog whose melancholy silenced the theatre. – Hollywood Reporter 2 Intrinsic or fundamental nature (7) 3 Sod (4) 4 Gigantic (8) 5 Of the female wedding partner (6) 6 Debar (10) 7 Immediate (7) 8 Triangular end of a pitched roof (5) 9 Load of cargo (8) 14 Motionless (5-5) 17 Firmness, rigidity (8) 18 Fetch (8) 20 Growing unchecked (7) 22 Pasta squares with meat or cheese fillings (7) 23 Swank (6) 24 Garlic mayonnaise (5) 26 Fair, impartial (4)
- 1 Bauxite. 2 Customarily. 3 Lapp. 4 Glimpsed. 5 Extort. 6 Incestuous. 7 Rut. 8 Madness. 12 Inattention. 13 Banishment. 16 Warranty. 17 Replete. 19 Exhaled. 20 Fairly. 23 Tuba. 25 Tip.
- 1 Ovett. 2 Öre. 3 Shea. 4 The Chairs. 5 Gardner. 8 Grinch. 11 Diaphragm. 13 Frisch. 14 Manatee. 16 Intro. 18 Riis. 20 Ava.