Fighting a post-fact narcissist

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This article was published 22/10/2016 (3624 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

American historian Deborah Lipstadt refuses to debate Holocaust deniers. She believes engaging with them can suggest the terrible, fundamental fact of the Holocaust is somehow up for dispute.

But when Lipstadt was sued for defamation in 1996 by English Holocaust denier and professional provocateur David Irving, she ended up being dragged into a long, expensive and emotionally draining ordeal that effectively put history on trial.

These events have been turned into a sometimes intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying drama, directed by Mick Jackson (Temple Grandin) and scripted by David Hare (The Reader), the English playwright and screenwriter.

Hare has spoken about his horror of “sentimentalizing” the Holocaust, and he keeps things crisp, cool and rather distant. This strategy might have paid off if he had created a taut legal procedural or a sparky exchange of ideas, but the script struggles to connect its potent parts into a compelling whole.

Rachel Weisz plays Lipstadt. A busy academic at Emory University in Atlanta, she has recently launched her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which includes references to Irving as a Holocaust denier. (Among other things, Irving has characterized Auschwitz as a labour camp with an unusually high death rate.)

Irving brings a libel suit against Lipstadt, claiming she has threatened his reputation. Because of the oddities of the British legal system, the burden of proof is on the defendant in libel actions. Lipstadt hires a legal team, headed by Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott, Sherlock’s Moriarty), who just happens to be the author of a book on T.S. Eliot and anti-Semitism — as well as a top solicitor, having represented Diana, the Princess of Wales, in her divorce.

Tom Wilkinson turns in a characteristically thoughtful performance as Richard Rampton, Lipstadt’s courtroom barrister, who expertly boxes in Irving using his own words.

The dark hole at the centre of the story, though, is Irving. Timothy Spall (Mr. Turner) gives a morbidly fascinating portrayal of a pompous, attention-hungry narcissist. Publicly, Irving projects a queasy veneer of respectability and joviality, but he’s haunted by secret insecurity.

Irving’s dilemma, according to Julius, is that he wants to be both a maverick outsider and a member of the club. “England is a club, Deborah,” Julius tells his client, hinting at the boundaries of privilege and class.

Lipstadt, of course, is another kind of outsider. With a broad Queens accent and a rather obvious wig, Weisz gives a passionate and earnest performance, but too many scenes involve her fired-up Americanness running smack into British reserve. In one supremely awkward sequence, her matter-of-fact New York ways reduce an entire dining table of English people to appalled silence.

The story doesn’t work as personal or emotional drama and it falls short as a drama of ideas. Denial ought to feel topical and timely, since we are witnessing the implications of an increasingly “post-factual” public discourse, where pseudo-science, conspiracy theories, galloping distrust of evidence-based knowledge and outright lies have gained increasing traction, allowing extremist ideas to enter mainstream discussion.

Lipstadt, along with the filmmakers, argues that while historical interpretations of events often vary, there are facts that possess indisputable objective truth. Unfortunately, this important argument doesn’t translate into any sense of cinematic urgency.

At one point during Denial, Lipstadt laments that the courtroom is not the best place to assess history. The movie theatre doesn’t always work that well, either.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca