Compelling court room drama
DENIAL Running time: 1hr 49 min Starring: Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott Director: Mick Jackson DEFENDING truth is the subject of the compelling courtroom drama Denial, which forcefully 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, a shining woman warrior, is a role she will be remembered for, while as her antagonist Timothy Spall (Mr Turner) makes a spookily stubborn, thoroughly despicable, but still human Irving.
Hare’s screenplay is carefully balanced but not morbidly respectful, allowing moments – many moments – of humour to lighten its weighty topic.
All the dialogue in the courtroom scenes is taken verbatim from the trial records, giving them an almost documentary level of realism.
Hare negotiates between these shoals while still hitting hard at the Nazi sympathiser Irving for his distortion of the historical evidence in the service of rehabilitating Adolf Hitler.
The film opens with a bang on Deborah’s fateful 1994 lecture at Emory University in Atlanta, where she teaches Jewish Studies. Her book has just been published by Penguin, and the lecture hall is packed with students. Suddenly a man stands up and identifies himself as David 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 in the mail postmarked England. Irving is suing her for libel on the grounds her book has ruined his career.
Deborah is soon meeting with famed British solicitor Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott) who represented Lady Diana 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.
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 in court; that task falls to noted barrister Richard Rampton, roundly portrayed by Tom Wilkinson as a hard-drinking, hard-hitting libel lawyer whose eloquence on the floor is a showstopper.
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.
Deborah 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, which Julius explains to her with unlawyer-like passion, 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.
Weisz is a rousing, articulate heroine channelling her passion and energy into a concrete cause. – Hollywood Reporter