Monthly Archives: February 2017

  • Denial

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mick Jackson (2016)

    ‘David against Goliath’ is how David Irving, in Mick Jackson’s Denial, describes the prospect of the real-life libel trial that the film dramatises.   In her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University, named Irving, among others, as a Holocaust denier.  Three years later, he sued her and her publisher, Penguin Books.  The libel suit was eventually heard, in a judge-only trial, in London, in the early weeks of 2000.  In Denial, Irving makes his biblical analogy with a smug grin that’s as unappealing as everything else about him; but on this point, if on no other, it’s hard to say that he’s wrong.  Irving appears at the trial as litigant in person, conducting his own case.   The legal team for Deborah Lipstadt is headed by Anthony Julius of Mishcon de Reya (Julius’s recent clients had included Diana, Princess of Wales); the lead defence barrister is the high-profile Richard Rampton QC (the McLibel case, etc).   The long tradition of David v Goliath oppositions – and against-the-odds legal victories – in screen courtroom drama makes the viewer all the more aware of what a peculiar contest is taking place here.  The considerable forces of the establishment are the good guys.  The plucky maverick is the villain of the piece.

    Although Mick Jackson’s filmography includes plenty of docudrama (more for television than for cinema) and David Hare has written the screenplay (based on Lipstadt’s History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier), Denial seems not just an unimaginative movie but a well-nigh pointless exercise.  The Penguin-Lipstadt lawyers, anxious that David Irving might work a jury to his advantage, request that the case be heard by a judge alone.  They submit that the technical arguments involved are too complex for a jury; Irving accedes to their request on the same grounds.  Mick Jackson and David Hare get across the point that in English law the burden of proof in a libel case rests with the defendant; that, in Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt, the latter therefore had to show that Irving knowingly distorted the available factual material in order to claim that the Holocaust never occurred.  But Jackson and Hare are nervous of getting into too much detail – they’re as worried it’ll send the viewer to sleep as the lawyers were nervous it would go over the jurors’ heads.  The worry is understandable but it prompts the question of whether this material is more suitable for documentary than dramatic treatment on screen:  videos of Irving’s racist and anti-Semitic speeches, played by the defence to the judge, have a stronger emotional impact on the viewer than anything else that occurs in court in Denial.

    Mick Jackson occasionally tries to force a moment of high drama.  During the summing up by Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson), Mr Justice Charles Gray (Alex Jennings) intervenes:  if Irving is a committed anti-Semite, the judge asks, isn’t it possible that the factual errors in his publications – errors which are the basis of the defence case – are, although reflections of Irving’s prejudice, ‘honest’ errors nevertheless?  Sharp intake of breath from Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz); Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott) is ashen-faced; even Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) falters at first as he responds to the question.  He then recovers his poise and insists that the defence has established that Irving consistently and knowingly played fast and loose with historical record in order to justify his arguments.  Rampton’s answer seems persuasive and the judge to acknowledge this, albeit in a properly non-committal way.  Even so, there’s an out-of-court follow-up:  back in the US, Deborah Lipstadt reiterates alarm at the implication of the judge’s intervention – to an Emory colleague who’s just about the only American, apart from her dog, that Lipstadt speaks to outside the lecture hall.  (The colleague is played by Nikki Amuka-Bird, so good in the recent adaptation of Zadie Smith’s NW on BBC.)  This outburst and the suspense as to which way the judgment will go seem phony attempts to conventionalise Denial.  The fact surely is that the defence in this trial succeeded largely thanks to the analysis, carried out over a two-year period after the bringing of the libel suit, of Irving’s published work by the distinguished Cambridge historian Richards Evans, the leading defence witness.  The painstaking work by Evans (played in the film by John Sessions) and his research assistants is essentially undramatic:  it reveals not a single smoking gun but a sustained tendentious pattern of selectiveness and misrepresentation.

    In one of the videos played in court, Irving (Timothy Spall) claims that all but 5% of the thinking public finds claims about the Holocaust (claims, that is, from those who believe it happened) ‘boring’.  As usual, you find yourself disagreeing with him but 5% is probably a big overestimate of the audience for Denial that is sympathetic to Irving and/or doesn’t regard him as not just unpleasant but a monomaniac bore.  Preaching to the converted is putting it extremely mildly.  Deborah Lipstadt won’t debate the Holocaust with Irving – their first clash in Denial occurs when he attends a public lecture she’s giving and makes his presence felt, in a big way, in the Q&A that follows.  At a press conference with Penguin after the judge has found in their favour, Lipstadt asserts, however, that she considers freedom of speech sacrosanct – and that her branding Irving a Holocaust denier was an attempt not to deny him free speech but to take him to task for abusing it.   With Donald Trump in the White House, this ‘abuse of free speech’ element of the material has a resonance the makers of Denial wouldn’t have expected but that unhappy accident isn’t enough to validate the film.

    Deborah Lipstadt is repeatedly and increasingly frustrated with the rules of the English libel game:  she’s enraged when Anthony Julius decides against putting her in the witness box, appalled that no Holocaust survivors will be invited to give evidence either.  Richard Rampton attempts to placate her with a description of his tried-and-tested tactical recipe for success in a libel case:  ‘Stay seated.  Button your lip.  Win’.  Rachel Weisz the actress must have been able to empathise with Deborah Lipstadt the frustrated witness:  Weisz is given little to do beyond (a) you-cannot-be-serious expostulations about English libel law and the Julius/Rampton trial strategy, and (b) expressions of passionate outrage on behalf of Holocaust victims.  (Both (a) and (b) are planted in David Hare’s script to pop up at regular intervals.)  Timothy Spall’s first appearance – as the sinister, mad-eyed Irving emerges from the shadows to gatecrash Lipstadt’s lecture – doesn’t bode well.  Overall, though, Spall does a creditable job:  he resists the temptation of simply commenting on the deeply unpleasant man he’s incarnating.   Although Spall is slightly younger than Irving was at the time of the trial, the actor’s considerable recent weight loss makes him look older and more vulnerable than the real, bullish thing.  This has the effect of reinforcing Irving’s underdog quality.

    A movie like this – too commercially conscious to settle for a quasi-documentary style but too thinly textured to work as drama – puts heavy demands on its lead actors:  they’re kept on a histrionically tight leash and expected to compel the audience at the same time.  In the circumstances, Tom Wilkinson does an admirable job of conveying the tension between Richard Rampton’s professional responsibility to stick to his brief and his personal feelings about the Holocaust and David Irving.  Andrew Scott’s natural eccentricity and wit give him a few good moments as Anthony Julius.   It’s no surprise, though, that those with relatively small roles, as junior members of the defence legal and research teams, create more believable people:  Caren Pistorius, Jack Lowden, Max Befort, Will Attenborough – and, especially, Jackie Clune, an older actress new to me.  The cast also includes Harriet Walter, in a cameo as an Auschwitz survivor, and Mark Gatiss, as the Dutch Holocaust scholar Robert Jan van Pelt.  Since I tend to complain about Alex Jennings, it’s only fair to report that, as the judge, he gives a well-judged performance, especially in that eleventh-hour intervention bit.

    30 January 2017

  • Captain Fantastic

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Matt Ross (2016)

    It could be the Danish connection or the Aragorn connection but Viggo Mortensen, although he was born in New York City, can seem somehow alien in urban American settings (in A History of Violence, for example). He naturally suggests determined intelligence too.  The combination makes Mortensen well cast as Ben Cash, the protagonist of Captain Fantastic.  Ben’s surname is misleading.  He has abandoned capitalism in favour of survivalism and lives with his family in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.  Ben’s six children are receiving home schooling of an extraordinary kind.  Under their father’s tutelage, they read widely and are encouraged to develop their critical thinking; they’re also physically super-fit, self-reliant hunter-gatherers.  Ben and his wife Leslie are constructively non-religious:  each December the family celebrates Noam Chomsky’s birthday rather than Christmas.

    The countercultural idyll is marred by one big thing.  Bipolar Leslie (Trin Miller) is no longer with her husband and children but in hospital, where her medical bills are paid by her parents, Jack (Frank Langella) and Abigail (Ann Dowd).   Although Ben has foresworn ‘technology’, the family has a camper van and it’s a phone call that he makes on an outing into town that sets the film’s plot in motion.  On the other end of the line, weeping Abigail tells Ben that Leslie has committed suicide; angry Jack yells that Ben’s ‘the worst thing that ever happened to this family’ and that he doesn’t want him at Leslie’s funeral.  Ben is outraged that will involve a Christian service and burial:  Leslie had left instructions that she wanted her body cremated and her ashes flushed down an easily available toilet.  The latter sounds a perverse specification on the part of someone who’d chosen a no-mod-cons life but no matter:  Ben sets off with the kids on a road trip to see that his wife’s will be done.

    The writer-director Matt Ross has used a nifty, distinctive context in which to play out a familiar familial tale – of bereavement, simmering resentments that boil over at a funeral, rebellion against parental authoritarianism, reconciliation.  Ben Cash may be full of contradictions but he’s not in the same league as Ross, who’ll stop at nothing to contrive a dramatic or comic payoff and is fearless in the face of cliché.  In the first scene of Captain Fantastic, the children and their father pop up in the forest their faces smeared in woad (or something); the eldest son Bodevan (George MacKay) kills a deer and Ben bids him eat the animal’s heart, uttering the time-honoured words, ‘You were a boy:  now you’re a man’.  (George MacKay is actually in his mid-twenties and a bit old for the part.)  If his hero is Noam Chomsky – a member of the MIT faculty since 1955 – why is Ben so antipathetic to liberal, secular higher education that Bodevan (Bo) has had to make secret applications to Ivy League universities because his father doesn’t want him to go to college?  (Bo has prepared the applications supposedly with Leslie’s help though it’s not clear how they were produced or transmitted.)  We’re told the family moved into the wild before the younger children were born; Ben considers organised religion uniquely pernicious.  How come, when a traffic cop pulls the camper over because of a dodgy taillight and asks Ben suspicious questions, the kids disarm the cop by breaking into Christian song to prove their father’s home schooling is bona fide religious?   An underlying question of the set-up, and one that remains unanswered:  what does Ben expect his kids to do once they’ve become adults?

    I suppose the answer to all these questions is that it doesn’t matter.  Matt Ross isn’t going to be deflected from setting up audience-pleasing oppositions:  his awareness of that audience – and what Richard Brody has called its ‘counter-superheroic expectations’ – is reflected even in the film’s title.  It’s a surprise to see the family in a supermarket and a shock when Ben collapses there with an apparent heart attack but he’s only pretending.  While he’s being attended to, the kids make a quick exit with the shopping, Ben assures the worried supermarket staff he’s OK and the family – irresistible subversive rascals that they are – drives off without paying.  Ben and the children make a brief, disastrous visit – en route to the funeral – to Leslie’s sister (Kathryn Hahn) and her husband (Steve Zahn).  This couple’s adolescent sons (Elijah Stevenson and Teddy Van Ee) are interested only in computer games and shamed by eight-year-old Zaja Cash (Shree Crooks)’s articulate summary of the meaning of the Bill of Rights.  Captain Fantastic takes place in a world where you have to go into the wilderness in order to read a book.  Ben’s children’s reading, ranging from Middlemarch to an introduction to quantum physics, is prescribed by their father.  When one of the older girls, Kielyr (Samantha Isler), announces that she’s well into Lolita, you wonder how she got hold of it.  The main purpose of Kielyr’s conversation with Ben about Lolita and Humbert is to enable the youngest child Nai (Charlie Shotwell) to ask his father what’s rape, what’s a penis, what’s a vagina …

    Little movie kids have been asking adults embarrassing questions for many years – Ben, of course, isn’t embarrassed and provides calmly informative answers to Nai.  The kid knows when to stop, though, and doesn’t follow up by asking what’s a urethra:  indeed, Matt Ross ensures the children’s impressively wide reading hasn’t made them curious enough to compare their own experiences to those of people in books or raised issues that lead them to press Ben to justify the family’s way of life.   When Bo meets and is instantly attracted to a real teenage girl, he’s as clueless as if he really were the enfant sauvage implied in the film’s opening rite-of-passage number – rather than the boy that Harvard, Yale and Princeton are, as we discover, queuing up to admit.  The embarrassment of his clumsy romantic overtures is enough for Bo to accuse Ben of leaving his book-learned kids unequipped for real, practical life.  It’s the standard invective against an intellectual in a movie but seems hard on a man who’s taught his sons and daughters to slaughter large animals and climb sheer cliffs, who gives them hunting knives and crossbows as Noam Chomsky Day presents.

    When she asks his name, Bo tells the girl he meets it’s Bodevan; when she asks what sort of a name that is, Bo explains his parents gave him and each of his siblings a unique name to reflect their unique individuality.  This struck me as the clinching illustration of Ben Cash’s tunnel-vision arrogance:  the USA is so especially rich in inconceivable forenames that coming up with a new one is an impossibly tall order (if Ben allowed himself access to the internet he would know that he and Leslie had failed).  Maybe the abbreviation of Bodevan’s name to the common-or-garden Bo is a mark of incipient resistance – although it’s his scowling, narrow-eyed younger brother Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton) who’s the prime mover in questioning their father’s project.  Ben’s hijacking of his wife’s church funeral service triggers full-scale hostilities between him and Leslie’s father, and the children’s minor rebellion against Ben.  After Rellian moves in with his grandparents, Ben oddly gives the job of ‘rescuing’ her brother from his bedroom to Vespyr (Annalise Basso).  She falls from the roof and nearly breaks her neck.   This is enough to make Ben feel guilty and decide all the children are better off with Jack and Abigail.  He goes sadly on his way but the kids prefer him really and hide in the camper, and then spring forth and bring tears to their father’ s eyes.  Off they all go to carry out their late mother’s crematory wishes, the mission culminating in an airport toilet.  By the end of the film, Jack and Abigail have been forgotten about; Bo has temporarily parted from his father and siblings on good terms (I wasn’t clear if he was off to university or to-find-himself:  in either case, money’s no object); and Ben has shaved off his wild-man beard.  He’s living with the other kids on a farm, and all five are now going to school.  This weak finale wants it both ways:  it seems meant to imply that Ben has learned to compromise but that neither he nor the children have sold out.

    Although one of the more persuasive things in Captain Fantastic is that Ben Cash’s wife decides to slit her wrists, you have to admire Viggo Mortensen’s ability to combine dogmatism with warmth and humour in a way that makes Ben tolerable company for a couple of screen hours.  Mortensen is transformed by becoming clean-shaven – Ben’s loss of facial hair is almost Samsonic.  It’s clear, as Sally said when we finished watching the film, that Mortensen enjoyed working with the youngsters and vice versa.   They’re all good enough, although one or two have a whiff of stage school rather than home schooling about them.  The vastly more experienced George MacKay gives an honestly felt, if unsurprising, performance. Frank Langella, Ann Dowd, Kathryn Hahn and Steve Zahn all make (a few) bricks from straw.

    28 January 2017

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