An Errol Morris documentary on an execution expert. Even before you get past the opening credits -- crackling electric arcs accompanied by quasi-Wagnerian heroic music -- the irony weighs on you like iron. And the rapidly deployed stylistic devices carried over from Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control -- the changeable film stocks (hallmark of cinematic postmodernism) and tilted cameras -- do nothing to lighten the load. But Morris does have a nose, if nothing else, and this is one of those true stories that could not have been made up. Leuchter's area of expertise led to his recruitment as a defense witness in the Canadian trial of Ernst Zündel, a Holocaust denier who had authored an inflammatory pamphlet entitled Did Six Million Really Die? Leuchter took to the task like a duck to water, dragging his brand-new bride (and a video crew) to Poland, in lieu of a honeymoon, where he furtively chipped away samples from the walls and floors of tumbledown Nazi concentration camps, now protected as national monuments. Following laboratory analysis of these samples, he authored his own Holocaust rebuttal, The Leuchter Report, and found a home-away-from-home on the neo-Nazi lecture circuit. (The new bride, not too surprisingly, is now a divorcée, declining to appear on camera but consenting to speak to a microphone.) He is, in every sense, quite a character -- forty cups of coffee and six packs of cigarettes per day, by his own reckoning, and the teeth to prove it -- and his ultimate comeuppance seems eminently well earned. It is doubtful, even at that, whether either he or it merited an entire movie. A between-commercials segment on 60 Minutes might have been about right. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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