For Denial, the most shocking thing about this film was that it was made in 2016. Everything about the camera work is so bland and uninspired at introducing Professor Deborah Lipstadt that if enough context was removed this film could literally be about any female professor that's liked by her students.
The initial barrage of Professor Lipstadt's routine is a series of extremely bland cuts from organically lit shot to organically lit shot, and in that barrage the blandness emerges. The trope of the beloved professor is so shoehorned in to create a character for Prof. Lipstadt that I feel completely alienated from the character at large. Denial's pacing alone is so bizarre at jumping to the lawsuit that I'm wondering why I should care about a story fighting Nazism. Jackson feels as though he's done enough to make me empathize with Prof. Lipstadt by showing me at the 14 minute mark how she'll be fighting an uphill legal battle. Around the 19 minute mark, Jackson choses to actively waste our time with an extremely unoriginal rainy London sequence to establish that she has arrived, and even though it's a minute long it's failure of purpose makes it stand out so belligerently. Rachel Weiss' acting as Lipstad feels so inorganic that I am completely skeptical and extremely bored by lines meant to be inspirational as "my mother always said there was gonna be an event. That I was picked out, I was chosen well here it is." (16:01) That alone is one of many lines that seems to have been taken verbatim from a book. Denial at large is a very aggressively okay film, and at large it seems as though the only thing it's missing is commercial breaks. A quick look through Denial's director's past works shows that the vast majority of his experience prior to his 2016 film is in television. Denial's entire goal of presenting an uphill battle for truth against hate, with it's recurring shots of stairs among other grandiose imagery of rising above, fails so spectacularly entirely because of it's pacing and strange dipping in and out of Documentarian nature.
If a film tells me that it's "based on true events" then why on earth is it showing me meaningless dates and times? Saying your movie is "based on true events" is the most blatantly lazy form of opening a film beyond subtitles showing location and narration, which this film also does. Denial if anything seems in denial of the fact that it's not an HBO series, but a film.
The initial barrage of Professor Lipstadt's routine is a series of extremely bland cuts from organically lit shot to organically lit shot, and in that barrage the blandness emerges. The trope of the beloved professor is so shoehorned in to create a character for Prof. Lipstadt that I feel completely alienated from the character at large. Denial's pacing alone is so bizarre at jumping to the lawsuit that I'm wondering why I should care about a story fighting Nazism. Jackson feels as though he's done enough to make me empathize with Prof. Lipstadt by showing me at the 14 minute mark how she'll be fighting an uphill legal battle. Around the 19 minute mark, Jackson choses to actively waste our time with an extremely unoriginal rainy London sequence to establish that she has arrived, and even though it's a minute long it's failure of purpose makes it stand out so belligerently. Rachel Weiss' acting as Lipstad feels so inorganic that I am completely skeptical and extremely bored by lines meant to be inspirational as "my mother always said there was gonna be an event. That I was picked out, I was chosen well here it is." (16:01) That alone is one of many lines that seems to have been taken verbatim from a book. Denial at large is a very aggressively okay film, and at large it seems as though the only thing it's missing is commercial breaks. A quick look through Denial's director's past works shows that the vast majority of his experience prior to his 2016 film is in television. Denial's entire goal of presenting an uphill battle for truth against hate, with it's recurring shots of stairs among other grandiose imagery of rising above, fails so spectacularly entirely because of it's pacing and strange dipping in and out of Documentarian nature.
If a film tells me that it's "based on true events" then why on earth is it showing me meaningless dates and times? Saying your movie is "based on true events" is the most blatantly lazy form of opening a film beyond subtitles showing location and narration, which this film also does. Denial if anything seems in denial of the fact that it's not an HBO series, but a film.