Denial

Denial is based on a 1996 legal case between Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), an American professor of Holocaust Studies, and the historian David Irving (Timothy Spall). Irving sues Lipstadt over her book ‘Denying the Holocaust’ in which she accuses Irving of being a Holocaust denier and falsifier of history.

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.

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.

The Lady In The Van

‘The Lady in the Van’ didn’t make a lot of sense to me but then you perhaps need to be an Alan Bennett aficionado to appreciate it. This film comes with not one but two Alan Bennetts (Alex Jennings), well actually three if you count the real one who turns up at the end.

This is apparently the real story of Mary Shepherd aka Margaret Fairchild (Maggie Smith), a woman who wiped out a motorcyclist and then went on the run from the police even though the police weren’t looking for her because it wasn’t her fault.

Bennett doesn’t know this when she turns up in a battered old van and parks in his well-to-do street in Camden. Spotting Bennett as a soft touch she worms her way on to his driveway, where she then lives in her van (or vans and always repainted yellow) for fifteen years until her death.

It wasn’t until after her death that they finally found out who she was but the film shows us, sort of, as we go along. Like how she was a gifted pianist who then tried to become a nun. How her brother put her in an institution from which she escaped. 

None of which fully explains why she acted as she did in the first place and what happened to the life she left behind. She is, it is implied, simply eccentric.

If that isn’t eccentric enough, then there’s Bennett himself or indeed the two Bennetts, Alan the writer and Alan the homeowner. Bennett the writer wrote a book about the whole thing, turned it into a play and now this film. Both of which starred Maggie Smith, who better to play a batty old woman.

The relationship between the two leads is the heart of the film but I found both of them insufferable and while I couldn’t understand the logic of her decision to live in a van, I couldn’t understand Bennett's decision to let her stay either.

So it’s all a bit too eccentric for me and that’s before we get to the graveyard scene at the end.