If you read this column, you need to see Denial. Here’s the fandango link. Buy tickets, bring tissues, go watch and be inspired. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll leave the theater with a fresh sense of purpose. (We did, anyway.)
Because if you read this space, you’re likely passionate about academic integrity, historical honesty and the importance of objective truth. Odds are you have a personal stake in beating back the forces of bias and are a champion of efforts to cast light on the dark arts of propaganda.
So we assume you will find Denial’s plot engrossing, wherein holocaust denier David Irving’s defamation suit against Emory professor Deborah Lipstadt is fought in London’s High Court. Without the standard Hollywood distraction of a cheesy romance or over-the-top violence, it is a powerful story beautifully told. Though the emotional heft of the Holocaust looms large throughout, the movie is wisely restrained in its depiction of the horrors at the core of the story.
While Lipstadt, played by Rachel Weisz, is surrounded by a robust legal team, the portrayal of David Irving by Timothy Spall captures an existential loneliness befitting the character, who mirrors in many ways the inhabitants of the world of climate change denial. At one point, Irving is described as an outsider who longs to be part to the club, a self-taught historian who prides himself on being a sort of Galileo, while at the same time wishing to be taken seriously by the establishment academics.
We’ve had almost verbatim discussions about climate deniers, who simultaneously decry the consensus as being anti-science yet mourn their exclusion from journals, the media and academia writ large.
Spall’s portrayal of Irving is startlingly similar to a particularly pompous, British blow-hard with a penchant for flowery rhetoric and outrageous bombast, frequently threatening lawsuits like Irving’s and burdened by what seems like an allergy to objective truth. We’d say who it is by name, but we don’t want a court date of our own.
For this is a film that needs no sequel.
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