It was merely 16 years ago that the existence of the Holocaust was put on trial in England. Wait, what?
It sounds preposterous, but it happened: David Irving, a British World War II historian turned Holocaust denier, filed a high-profile libel suit against Penguin Books and American scholar Deborah Lipstadt, who called Irving what he was in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. With folks like Steven Spielberg funding the defendant, the bench trial ran for weeks and produced a written judgment of 334 pages.
Far be it from me to spoil an outcome so obvious it’s virtually self-evident. Let Denial, Mick Jackson’s puffed-up, self-congratulatory docudrama, do the trick. Jackson is a native Brit who became a Hollywood journeyman in the ’90s; his last feature film was 1997’s Volcano, the Tommy Lee Jones disaster spectacle. For all its high-minded and worthy aspirations as an intellectual legal drama about the limits of free speech, the rewriting of history and the scourge of false equivalency, Denial is ultimately shot through the lens of a reductive action blockbuster.
It opens in a college lecture hall in 1994, where Irving (Timothy Spall) disrupts a presentation by Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), unsuccessfully attempting to goad her into a debate. Soon enough, Lipstadt receives the libel notice, and since, in England, the burden of the proof is on the accused, she must secure the best defense available: solicitor advocate Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott), who represented Princess Diana in her divorce proceedings, and leading libel lawyer Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson), a hard-drinking, emotionally detached Scotsman.
The pretrial scenes are the film’s strongest, particularly the defense team’s visit to a cold, gray, still-menacing Auschwitz. The defendant and her counsel encounter literally a mountain of evidence, in the form of hundreds of thousands of victims’ shoes piled for posterity. And they retrace these victims’ steps into the gas chamber as closely as they can. We needn’t see emaciated bodies and heaps of corpses to feel the devastating dread; Jackson lets our memories — if only from other Holocaust movies — fill in the flashbacks. If you start to feel queasy and find that your breathing has slowed to an imperceptible pace, you’ll know the scene is working.
Denial starts to lose its credibility during the trial, which is its dramatic nexus. While Irving’s courtroom showmanship easily gets under your skin — he devises the Cochranesque epigram “No Holes, No Holocaust,” referring to an early blueprint of Auschwitz’s pillar design that omitted the holes later drilled for the purpose of dispensing the killer pesticide Zyklon-B — it’s easier still, and more smugly satiating, to watch the defense puncture the absurdity of his arguments. Spall’s Irving is a jowly, unattractive and irredeemable villain, lacking only a black hat and handlebar (or shall we say toothbrush?) moustache, and when the camera cuts to him, he always looks like he’s sucking a lemon.
As the trial wears on, Irving’s history of racism and anti-Semitism resurface, and the viewer is invited to draw connections between this raging coot and the white nationalist movements that led to Brexit, in the U.K., and Donald Trump’s candidacy, in this country. This will require little brainpower; David Hare’s facile screenplay is surely engineered to reflect current political anxieties.
Disingenuously wrenching doubt and suspense from a foregone conclusion, Denial dutifully favors the uncontroversial position of the 99.99 percent of us who have accepted the endlessly documented reality of the Shoah, peppering its screenplay with trailer-ready mission statements like “not all opinions are equal.” We nod along to these professorial conclusions, and we berate a marginal, risible Nazi apologist, and we leave the auditorium feeling good about ourselves, satisfied by the movie’s inarguable slant. The best films challenge our perceptions; unnecessary ones massage them.
DENIAL. Director: Mick Jackson; Cast: Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott, Jack Lowden, Caren Pistorius; Distributor: Bleecker Street/Entertainment One; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Friday at Cobb Downtown Gardens, Cinemark Palace and Regal Shadowood; Oct. 21 in Broward and Miami-Dade counties