Winner of the screenwriting award at Cannes in 2011 and Israel’s official submission to the 84th Academy Awards Best Foreign Film category, Footnote finally gets its local release on March 30, and if it had come out last calendar year, it would have been a contender for one of my favorite films of the year. Building its story around a seemingly obscure subject, the rivalry between Talmudic scholars, Footnote is a wily, emotionally astute, subtly profound, and often hilarious movie about fathers and sons, life’s meaning and individual legacy.
The movie opens as Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi) receives an award for his work from the academic community. Throughout the ceremony, however, writer/director Joseph Cedar keeps Uriel’s father Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba) in the frame. Eliezer seems unaffected both by his son’s accomplishment and his son’s speech, which goes out of its way to bestow honor on the old man. As we go through the subsequent days after the ceremony, we soon discover the source of the tension we saw in the man’s face. Both father and son are experts in the same field, and while the young scholar has enjoyed popular success and acclaim, Eliezer devoted himself to a tertiary topic, only to have fruits of long, focused study snatched away when his pending academic discovery is “scooped” by a rival scholar. That, in effect, renders Eliezer’s life work mute.
All this has left Eliezer an inverted, closeted, ornery, and suspicious man, his familial and professional relationships affected by a caustic sense of scorn. Everything is thrown in the air, however, when Eliezer receives a call notifying him that he has been chosen, after decades of submissions, to be the recipient ofIsrael’s top honor, the Israel Prize. But wait, there has been an administrative mistake. The committee intended to give the prize to Uriel, not Eliezer, and when the academics on the Israel Prize board call Uriel in to explain the situation, they end up pitting son against father.
Cedar’s direction manages to leverage a range of structural techniques, at times jumping and bouncing through information, bullet-pointed recaps about his characters in almost Guy Richie fashion; other times he allows scenes, such as the heated meeting between Uriel and the Israel Prize committee, to unfold with incredible patience, allowing the tension to build and bubble. What strings it all together is Cedar’s remarkable script, which turns library-bound study into the setting of high tragedy, while maintaining a spunky, almost slapstick sense of humor that is reminiscent of the satiric social-political self-deprecation of Nanni Moretti’s early films. At the heart of Footnote are questions of honor and the meaning of one’s life; at stake is the fear that the effort of one’s existence has been a waste. What holds it all together is a question about the intrinsic integrity of the truth and the nature of white lies. Shlomo Bar-Aba is wonderful as the old man, turning in a muted, seething, tight-lipped performance that rivals Gary Oldman’s role in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the sheer brilliance of its involving minimalism.
