Review of Denial (2016) by Justin J — 09 Oct 2017

At one point in the film, the defense counsel Richard Rampton (played by Tom Wilkinson) says to Deborah Lipstadt (played by Rachel Weisz): "This case is happening to you, but it's not about you.".

If only the filmmakers had followed this sage advice. Instead, they chose to place the weight of the film on the shoulders of Weisz's overly-strident, New Yawk-ish caricatured performance, with predictably unsatisfactory results. Furthermore, the idea that Professor Lipstadt would be so clueless and naive as to require explanations for even obvious developments, as is the case repeatedly in this film, strains credulity.

Since the film was based on Lipstadt's own account of the case, perhaps director Mick Jackson & Co. were more or less forced to make her character the center of the narrative, which is unfortunate. They were likewise hamstrung by the need to create drama where there was none--it's quite clear from reading accounts of the David Irving v. Penguin UK/Lipstadt trial that Irving was in over his head in representing himself in court, and that the defense's demolition of his intellectual reputation was methodical, merciless, inevitable, and irrefutable.

For a more satisfactory account of the proceedings depicted in "Denial", I would direct the curious reader to:

"The Holocaust On Trial", by D.D. Guttenplan.

&.

"Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial" by Sir Richard Evans (a summing up of the massive historical brief compiled by Evans & his two graduate assistants that utterly eradicated Irving's standing as anything resembling an honest or competent historian).