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