How ‘girl from Queens’ beat arch Holocaust denier

PETER FELDMAN

Denial is a provocative and thought-proving film. It’s about infamous Holocaust denier, David Irving and the riveting courtroom battle with an American academic being sued by him for libel.  

This illuminating study will mesmerise audiences with its intelligence and wit, vividly illustrating how facts can be manipulated to support a person’s warped arguments.

What makes Mick Jackson’s film so powerful is that it’s based on a true story, one that grabbed world headlines in 2000.

Jewish actress Rachel Weisz is superb in her portrayal of Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic who teaches Jewish history courses at Emory University in Atlanta. She was sued for libel in England by Irving, a prejudiced, controversial and widely hated English historian and Nazi sympathiser.

Working from a magnificent screenplay by the distinguished British playwright David Hare, director Mick Jackson has forged a truly memorable production that brings back searing memories of the Holocaust.

The key role of Irving is brilliantly played by English actor Timothy Spall, imbuing his character with an understated but creepy mien, while the august Tom Wilkinson, another British screen legend, is cast as the eccentric and renowned Scottish barrister, Richard Rampton, hired to defend Lipstadt. He plays the character with a blend of cunning and warmth.

In her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust, this celebrated academic had labelled Irving a Holocaust denier. It was a charge which he claimed – despite insisting there were no gas chambers and the Holocaust was a myth perpetrated by publicity-seeking Jews – had damaged his career.

Over the years Lipstadt had constantly refused invitations to publicly debate Irving on his assertion that the genocide of six million Jews was a hoax, saying that she “won’t debate facts”.

But Lipstadt was shocked when she was forced to fight prejudice in a British court of law and her ensuing two-year battle forms the crux of the film, based on her book Denial: Holocaust History on Trial.

In England, the burden of proof in a libel case is always placed on the accused and you are assumed guilty until you can prove your own innocence. Lipstadt had no choice but to defend herself in a heated trial with excellent support from a top-notch legal team that comprised Richard Rampton and ace solicitor, Anthony Julius, played with “cut-glass” pucker English accent by Andrew Scott. Julius gained fame as Princess Diana’s lawyer in the famous divorce case against Prince Charles.

Here was a scenario where Irving, a wealthy, prickly and formidable British anti-Semite is pitted against a Jewish girl from Queens whose task was to prove the Holocaust was actually one of history’s most defining events.

The outcome is no secret, but the mastery of the storytelling art will have you standing up and cheering.

Some of the scenes remain a disturbing reminder of the past as the legal team head on a fact-finding mission to Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, where one-million prisoners were murdered,.

The team observe, through the mist and rain, the enormous gravesites at the camp and view a section where thousands of discarded spectacles were left behind by people on their way to the gas chambers. It is a harrowing and unforgettable experience.

Denial is accurate in recording the specifics of the court case and the characters involved and, in the end, it leaves one extremely absorbing and emotionally drained.