Film reviews round-up: Denial, Christine, Sing

★★★☆☆

Dir: Mick Jackson, 110 mins, starring: Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott, Jack Lowden

Denial manages the unlikely (and surely unintentional) feat of inducing a sliver of sympathy for the notorious Holocaust denier, David Irving. This is nothing to do with his views, which are repellent, or his abilities as a historian, which the film exposes as dubious, or with the fact that he effectively skewered himself when he pursued his libel action against Deborah Lipstadt. It is just that, pitted against the British legal establishment, Irving doesn’t stand a chance.

David Hare’s screenplay acts as a useful primer on the case, but the film itself is short on dramatic tension. Timothy Spall plays Irving with a soul-sapping melancholy. The historian comes across as a slightly pathetic figure as well as a creepy one, often seen in the shadows. England is “a club and he wants to join” but no one is giving him admission.

His stunts, for instance disrupting one of Lipstadt’s lectures to offer $1,000 to anyone who can provide documentary proof of the Holocaust, reveal how desperate he is for attention. The rival lawyers don’t look at him and won’t even shake his hand. Spall gives a poignant performance but doesn’t capture the smugness and strange ebullience the real-life Irving so often projects.

The libel case takes place in London because, in Britain, the burden of proof in such cases lies with the defendant. That throws Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), the American academic, into a world that she doesn't understand. As she points out, the legal system she encounters is not so much Dickensian as “Kafka-esque.”

She has a charismatic solicitor in Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott), who once acted for Princess Diana, and a QC in Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) who fully lives up to the stereotype of the brilliant but eccentric British lawyer. Weisz captures well her character’s bafflement not just at the British legal system but at British society generally. She also shows just how steadfast Lipstadt was in the face of Irving’s attacks.

We see her beneath a statue of warrior queen Boadicea. She has the sense that she has been “chosen” for a great battle and she won’t settle with Irving, whatever the advice of the upper-middle class types she meets at north London dinner parties who bizarrely advise her to settle. The film stays very true to the actual events. The dialogue from the courtroom scenes was taken verbatim from the court records.

Hare has made it clear that he wasn’t interested in Irving’s psychology – so that cuts off one route down which Denial might have gone. The film doesn’t try to understand where Irving’s anti-Semitism comes from or what impact his behaviour will have on his family, for example on the little daughter he dotes on even as he teaches her racist ditties.

The legal strategy pursued by Rampton and Julius cuts off another line the film might have explored. They don’t call survivors as witnesses. They don’t want Irving to have the chance to humiliate them. They don’t even allow Lipstadt herself to speak. She wants her lawyers to fight like “junkyard dogs” but there is no jury and Julius is far too clever in his Thomas Cromwell-like way to allow emotion to cloud the defence.

For his part, Rampton works very hard, drinks copious amounts of vintage claret and whisky in plastic cups and serves up sandwiches from his cupboards to anyone who visits him in his chambers. When he visits Auschwitz as part of his research, he treats it as a crime site, not as a memorial to those who died there. There are continual hints that this is more than “just another brief” for him but he keeps his feelings under wraps.

As a courtroom drama, Denial is always intriguing. The defence lawyers pursue their strategy with the discipline of chess players thinking many moves ahead. Beyond the court, the storytelling is flat. This is a pared-down and low-key film. The way protagonists introduce themselves is often clunky. “Hello, I am Richard Evans,” or “I am David Irving,” or “you must be Anthony Julius,” they’ll say as if to save themselves the bother of wearing badges on their lapels.

We get little sense of their inner lives. Even the denouement is a little anti-climactic. There’s no jury verdict. Instead, the judge Sir Charles Gray (Alex Jennings) goes off and writes a 300-page report. Even then, the lawyers get to see it first and Lipstadt has to wait an extra day.

Any victory over Holocaust deniers is likely to be pyrrhic unless the deniers change their beliefs. What’s most dismaying as this film hits British cinemas is that Irving today claims to have more support now than he did at the time of the trial.

★★★☆☆

Dir: Antonio Campos, 119 mins, starring: Rebecca Hall, Michael C Hall, Tracy Letts, Maria Dizzia, J. Smith-Cameron, Timothy Simons

Antonio Campos’s Christine is the second feature about Christine Chubbuck to be released in a matter of months. It follows on from the recent documentary Kate Plays Christine but doesn’t come any closer than that film to explaining Chubbuck’s actions. She was the 29-year-old newsreader who committed suicide live on air in 1974.

Rebecca Hall gives an excellent performance as Christine, one that captures the character’s mix of insecurity and ambition, her extreme reticence and her desire to be liked. She’s a reporter for a local Florida TV station that is losing audience share. She has an Ed Murrow-like sense of vocation and wants to report on issues that affect the community. Her boss Michael (Tracy Letts) is looking for sensationalism – blood and gore, even if the news isn’t strictly local. “If it bleeds, it leads,” is his mantra.

Christine isn’t especially sympathetic. Socially, she is very gauche. In the workplace, she is extremely competitive. She’ll have tantrums when her news items are passed over in favour of someone else’s. She lives at home with her mother Peg (J. Smith-Cameron) and has a fraught relationship with her, expressing extreme disapproval when Peg tries to find a boyfriend.

There are hints that she is ill – she complains about stomach pains – but also a sense that she is a hypochondriac. She hates it when her mother reminds her of a breakdown she suffered earlier in her career. Hall shows us the character’s less likeable side but also portrays her resilience and intelligence. She can always out-argue her boss, which makes him like her even less. She has an acerbic sense of humour but can be unexpectedly kind, for instance when putting on puppet shows for kids in the hospital.

Christine is at its most lively as a record of life in a small-town American TV station in the early 1970s. This is an era in which reports are still edited together by hand on film, with journalists making cuts and amendments right up until broadcast.

The Chubbuck case can be read in many ways. It’s partly about gender. Christine is a victim of sexism. Michael treats the dim-witted but good-looking male news reporter George (Michael C Hall) far better than he does Chubbuck. Christine has a crush on George but seems oblivious to the fact that the weather forecaster (Timothy Simmons) is keen on her.

The film is also about the changing nature of the media in a period when the lines between news and entertainment become blurred and when violence is on the rise.

In the end, Campos and screenwriter Craig Shilowich can’t come up with any real explanation for Chubbuck’s desperate gesture. Some might argue that her story exposes fault lines and anxieties in Watergate-era America. There is a danger, though, in trying to read too much into it. More than 40 years on, Chubbuck’s death seems as sad and as unfathomable as it did in 1974. That’s why both films about her are such morbid and frustrating experiences.

★★★☆☆

Dir: Garth Jennings, 108 mins, voiced by: Matthew McConaughey , Reese Witherspoon, Seth MacFarlane, Scarlett Johansson

This is a golden age for Hollywood animation. Illumination’s Sing, however, isn’t quite on the level of such recent offerings as Finding Dory, Moana, or Zootoopia. In a plot line that combines elements of old backstage musicals with X Factor-like talent shows, Buster Moon (voiced with appealing enthusiasm by Matthew McConaughey) is the koala bear impresario who runs a grand but decaying old theatre.

He’s out of money and the bank is about to foreclose on him. In a last-ditch effort to keep the theatre going, he stages a singing competition. His ancient secretary Miss Crawly (Garth Jennings), an iguana, prints by mistake that the winner will receive $100,000 – and this leads to thousands of animals turning up for the auditions.

The film is made in the usual eye-popping colour. The auditions themselves mark the high point – a relentless montage, which includes a snail singing 'Ride Like The Wind' and giraffes, coy elephants, apes, dancing pigs, Frank Sinatra-like mice and punk porcupines performing their versions of well-known standards. Given that the soundtrack incorporates everything from Beatles’ songs ('Golden Slumbers' performed by Jennifer Hudson), Wham, Taylor Swift and Elton John, the music rights here must have cost a fortune.

The film has so much zany energy early on that it takes a moment or two to realise just how predictable the storytelling is becoming. There are still plenty of inspired visual gags – many involving Rosita the singing pig (voiced by Reese Witherspoon) who’s a mum and housewife with 25 piglets and an exhausted husband to look after between rehearsals. Buster and the finalists all have problems in their private lives to overcome, calamity strikes more than once, but you don’t need to be a soothsayer to predict that everything will be alright in the end.

Nobody could take against Sing. It’s cheery, toe-tapping fare that kids are bound to enjoy and that has enough nostalgia and in-jokes to keep the adults happy enough too. The music is incessant and very well chosen. In story terms, though, Sing is as clumsy as the half-blind iguana whose glass eyeball always pops out at the most vital moments.