The trial is held in Irving’s native England where the
burden of proof is with the accused not the accuser. Basically she has to prove
that the Holocaust happened. Easy right. Not so.
Lipstadt, a runner and a dog lover (so you have to like
her), engages a top legal team to fight her case. This actually means that she
doesn't in the end have to prove anything as her legal team totally take over.
So she can pretty much get back to her running and dog walking for the next few
years as the process rolls along.
In fact solicitor Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott) and
barrister Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) treat her more like a naughty child
than the one accused. They quarrel about how to approach the case with Lipstadt
wanting to take the stand herself and bring in Holocaust survivors to testify while
Julius prefers to simply present the facts. So off they go to try to find proof
of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Denial must have been a tricky film to make when you
consider the topic, the potential for emotional bias and the fact the majority
of the viewers either knew or could accurately guess the outcome of the trial.
Which does not leave much scope to build meaningful tension but overall I think
overall they did a decent job.
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In court, Irving, serving as his own lawyer, has an answer
for everything but not usually a very convincing one. So things progress as you
would expect and hope until Mr Justice Gray (Alex Jennings) throws the defence
team slightly off balance when he asks whether Irving might not actually be
lying as they claim, if he genuinely believed the Holocaust didn’t happen. It
is the one moment of ‘almost tension’.
Denial is easy to watch, informative but perhaps just
lacking that vital dramatic spark that would have made it great.
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