‘Denial’ puts the Holocaust, and free speech, in focus
Rachel Weisz stars in the story of the author’s case to prove atrocities really happened
Denial is a siren call for truth.
The drama (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expanding nationwide throughout October) chronicles a famous 1996 English libel court case brought by Holocaust denier David Irving (played by Timothy Spall) against American Jewish academic Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz).
The stakes are high: In English civil courts, the burden of proof in libel cases is on the defendant, and if Irving had won, it would have legitimized anyone who claimed the Holocaust was fabricated. Astoundingly, that means Lipstadt’s legal team had to prove the Holocaust occurred. “The film is about the fight for truth in general,” Weisz says.
The film takes dialogue verbatim from trial records (Irving argues forcefully that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz). Weisz, 46, who identifies as Jewish, filmed just outside the perimeter fence at Auschwitz, chronicling a trip that Lipstadt and her Scottish lawyer (Tom Wilkinson) took for research. De
nial joins just a few movies allowed to shoot near the site, and Weisz says she had never been to the death camp before.
In the film, Weisz adopts Lipstadt’s brassy Queens accent and serves up a forceful presence. “She’s very ballsy, she’s very fun and she’s very provocative,” Weisz says. “She’s very different from a British person. We’re a bit more reserved. She says what she thinks.”
The real Lipstadt calls Weisz’s portrayal “amazing. I think she captured me as much as I can hear it. But the perfection was in the care and the dedication and the wanting to get it right,” she said.
In one scene, Weisz portrays a dinner where Lipstadt attempts to raise funds from prominent British Jews for the much-publicized trial. They encourage her to settle. “The British Jews did say to her, ‘Shhh, be quiet,’ ” Weisz says. “It’s true that in England, speaking as a British Jew, we sort of stay quiet, just almost about being Jewish. We don’t want to make a fuss.”
The courtroom drama works to combat “a whole gamut of -isms,” says Lipstadt, from antiSemitism to racism to sexism. The film “won’t change the people who lie but what I hope — and all of us hope — is that it will make the people who encounter these lies (take action). The media, academics, the public at large have to say, ‘No, there were not a thousand Muslims dancing in Jersey City on 9/11. That’s just not true.’ ”
Weisz says she hopes the film inspires young people to speak up.
“In America, (Donald) Trump has kind of condoned people being racist,” the actress says. “Kids in schools are saying to other kids, ‘You should go back to Mexico, we’re going to build a wall.’ Bullying has somehow become OK. And that’s really scary, I think.”