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Eliezer
and Uriel
Shkolnik are locked in an unlikely father-son relationship. They are
both leading
professors within the rigorous and rarefied field of Talmudic Studies:
an obscure
discipline dedicated to the application of objective analysis to
ancient Jewish
texts in furtherance of our understanding of such topics as the texts’
historical backgrounds, reflections of daily reality, linguistic
characteristics and literary sources. Eliezer (Shlomo Bar’Aba) is a
bitter old-school
purist who has spent his career parsing texts with a research-intensive
analytic
approach. His life’s greatest achievement amounts to a single footnote
buried
between the pages of an influential tome in which his legendary mentor
and the
book’s author briefly acknowledges his contributing research. His son
Uriel
(Lior Ashkenazi), by way of contrast, is a popular and accomplished
scholar who
delivers lectures in academic institutions across the country. Every
waking
moment Eliezer must suffer the ultimate humiliation of living in his
son’s shadow.
One fateful day, the Minister of Education phones Eliezer to inform him
that he
is going to be awarded the coveted Israel Prize – a personal holy grail
that
has eluded his grasp for nearly two decades. A newspaper confirms it.
Shortly
afterwards, the Israel Prize committee phones Uriel to arrange an
emergency
meeting. It informs Uriel that he is the
true recipient of the prize and that his father was mistakenly awarded
the
prize due to a freak mix-up over their identities. The sorry debacle
forces Uriel
into the dilemma of either letting his father live an illusion and
permanently
forfeiting his future claims to the award or allowing the Board to
restore
their actual judgment at the cost of his father’s heartbreak.
Joseph
Cedar’s “Footnote”
is a tragicomic triumph with a daring plotline that succeeds in the end
because
of its surprising offbeat humour and unswerving confidence in its
esoteric material.
The concept of the “footnote”, as suggested by the title, functions as
a
perfect metaphor for the film’s story and Eliezer’s character, as it is
used to
denote an anecdote that is of minor importance yet is too good to be
omitted. Cedar’s
anecdote opens up an absurd world of niche humour that mines its comedy
from
the most unexpected places. Don’t be at all surprised if you find
yourself laughing
uncontrollably at its classy collection of visual gags that image such
situations as a secret meeting held in a confined space and attended by
self-important
luminaries, Uriel serving a rocket ace in blind fury during a friendly
squash
game and Eliezer engaging in a childish argument with a guard over his
security
clearance. Cedar transforms the Israeli Talmud establishment into a
comic and
dramatic site of struggle where rival professors wage epic unspoken
wars,
highly intelligent scholars behave like little children and careers are
made or
stayed over the tiniest of details. However,
beneath all the wry humour, the story allegorises the troubling
universal relationships
between fathers and sons. The film’s comedy is thus offset by the
genuine pathos
that its familial portrayals arouse. Eliezer and Uriel, in spite of
their
respective foibles, both represent hapless victims of tragic
circumstances operating
outside their control. Bar’Aba’s
performance is outstanding in conveying this sympathetic image. The
film’s
sporadic graphic narration is tawdry, however, the film’s overwhelming
strengths
mitigate this defect completely. I strongly recommend this one.
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