Or so I thought.
Denial is the second Bleecker Street production I've seen this year, the second that I saw because nothing else looked very good, and the second that has blown away my expectations. The first was Eye in the Sky back in April, which is sure to be toward the top of my year-end movie list for 2016. Denial isn't quite at that level but is very good in its own right.
The film tells the story of Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, who was sued for liable in England by Nazi scholar and Holocaust denier, David Irving for claiming that he was distorting facts and presenting them as truth. It starts with their first encounter - Irving loudly interrupting one of her presentations - and follows through the different stages of her trial. The stakes are higher than they should be because, in England, the burden of proof is on the defendant, meaning, Prof. Lipstadt must essentially, 60 years after the fact, prove that the Holocaust happened in order to win her case. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that? This trial was in 2000, which is far more recent than I would've assumed. And, if Prof. Lipstadt loses, she risks legitimizing the belief that the Holocaust didn't happen, that it was just an exaggeration.
What keeps the film engaging throughout is how it resists the urge to go bigger than it needs to. It's a movie about people doing their jobs and doing them well. That's the same thing that made Spotlight so good last year. Because, while Deborah is the lead, she's mostly an observer. The central conflict of the film isn't between Prof. Lipstadt and Mr. Irving. It's between her impulses as the client and her lawyers' knowledge of the system and what it will take to win. It's a film about building a legal case, methodically and strategically. It's about people putting months of work in to make sure things are done right. It's about the smaller fights that win the bigger battle. That sounds kind of boring, but it's not. I'd rather see people struggling because something is hard rather than because a random plot complication demands it.
Rachel Weisz manages to put on Prof. Lipstadt's Queens accent without getting lost in the caricature, which is damn near award-worthy on its own. She does a good job keeping the focus on her character even when she's technically not doing much. I don't know anything about the real David Irving, but if you are looking for an actor who can be foul while also on the fringes of being aristocratic, Timothy Spall is the perfect choice. Andrew Scott is sufficiently stuffy while also being a man of conviction, as one of Lipstadt's two lead lawyers. Tom Wilinson, as the other lead lawyer, is about as un-showy as he can be. The cast is much larger than that - mainly to point out how many people are involved in a single-case like this - but those four are at the core.
It's a small movie, to the point where it could just as easily be a TV movie. That's probably why it's barely had a release beyond major cities. The fact that Irving never feels like an actual threat means the stakes never get high enough to pull me in the way that something like Spotlight does and is about the only thing keeping me from raving about Denial rather than just highly recommending it. Regardless, this is a strong example of a type of movie that I wish would be made more often. Thank god for these slow weeks at the theaters or else I never would've seen this.
Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend
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