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As an American trial lawyer, this film aroused many emotions in me that courtroom dramas rarely if ever do. On one level, the plot is about the moral bankruptcy of Holocaust deniers. But on another level, it's also about the relationship between society and the court systems they rely upon to achieve justice. Sometimes this relationship is tenuous, and lacks a sense of trust. But most lawyers know too well that, imperfect as it may be, there are no alternatives to entrusting the search for truth to this ancient process and its ancient rules. This tension surfaced frequently between Professor Lipstadt and the truly skilled lawyers who represented her. The actors portrayed that tension beautifully. Compounding the professor's understandable fear that the legal process was inadequate in general, was her American bias against the sometimes bizarre (to Americans) way that British law operates. As her character commented in the movie, it's incredibly difficult to allow another person to be the voice of one's own conscience. Yet this is ultimately the burden that lawyers must carry. Professor Lipstadt had a serious deck stacked against her, on that point. Not only was she sued by an intellectually bankrupt but shrewd liar, but she had to trust a foreign nation's system that (a) allowed her to be sued in the first place, and (b) forced her to carry the burden of proof even though she was the defendant. These realities of British law drove her crazy, as they would many Americans--much less American professors of Jewish origin who are scholarly experts on the Holocaust. Time and time again, the lawyers had to all but fight to persuade her that their expertise in the methods of cross-examination, their mastery of the facts even though *she* was the scholar, and the orderly process of courtroom procedure must be respected--to the exclusion of her desire to take the stand herself and articulate to the world what her expertise had taught her. Trials are not won by grand speeches to the world, though. They're won by discrediting witnesses to the "trier of fact" alone, who in this case was a single judge sitting in the courtroom. The lawyers knew this but the client did not. To win, then, the lawyers needed to not just win in court but also prevail in persuading their client to trust them. That is not always an easy task. I don't know if the courtroom scenes mirrored the actual transcript of the real Irving trial. But for the most part, they were realistic enough depictions of Anglo-American legal customs, allowing for some dramatic license. The movie did not bog itself down with technical and procedural details, so I had to suspend my knowledge of them. Non-lawyers would be bored by them, and they're really not the essence of the story being told anyway. One powerful courtroom "process" moment was when the judge merely asked a probing question of the professor's lawyer, with connotations that were sympathetic to Irving's Holocaust-denial perspective. This caused the professor to nearly lose her marbles--and yet questions of such a nature are a routine part of the legal process. One can not always know whether a question and its "connotations" reflect the judge's actual opinion, or whether the judge is merely testing his proposition to make sure that it holds water. Which one turned out to be the outcome is something the movie does a good job creating some suspense on.