Footnote

Synopsis: Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba) is an academic who has spent a lifetime analyzing musty versions of the Talmud trying to identify the original version. Years ago his big research breakthrough was trumped by a rival professor (Micah Lewensohn) and the devastated Eliezer retreated further into his research, his only recognition a footnote in a definitive tome on the subject by his mentor. Meanwhile his son, Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi), also a Talmudic scholar, is showered with academic glory.. When it is announced that Eliezer has been chosen for the Israel Prize, it seems that his moment in the sun has arrived, but, as ever, bitter irony awaits him.

Most films take us on a journey from A to Z. Some films stop short. The latter approach is more daring but also more dangerous. Did Thelma and Louise perish at the bottom of a ravine? Did Butch and Sundance die in a blaze of bullets? We don’t know for sure but the freeze frame method is a dramatically tried-and-true way of “suspending” the narrative. Footnote, which was the Israeli Academy Award nominee for 2011, also suspends its narrative but not so successfully.  Given that in every other respect it is a superbly crafted film this is a considerable let-down especially as it appears to be an artistic choice rather than a response to production difficulties.

Footnote opens brilliantly with a medium close-up of two men, one older, one younger seated in the front row at a presentation ceremony.  When, after lavish encomiums, the awardee’s name is announced as Professor Uriel Shkolnik, the younger man rises to accept the award and thank the older man, his father, for his success. And so the film’s dramatic engine, a father-son conflict of Talmudic proportions, is kick-started.

Writer-director Cedar sets his time honoured theme in a low-key context but invests it with subtle wit and presents it with directorial flair, using some neat devices to tie together the episodic narrative. As the dourly pedantic Eliezer, a man nearly as desiccated as the texts that he studies, an embittered individual who compensates for his failed career with disdain for his academic colleagues, Shlomo Bar-Aba gives a finely nuanced performance.  Eliezer is a man whom we can understand, feel sorry for but not admire - in his own way he is a villain, albeit one who hurts himself more than anyone else. Lior Ashkenazi is inversely engaging as the toil of his loins who bravely tries to circumvent his Oedipal destiny even though he realizes the folly of his actions.

Given the limited terrain which the plot covers, Cedar does an impressive job of keeping us involved in the proceedings with a playfully intelligent screenplay that well captures the bitter competitiveness in this ivory tower world.  But having lain out such an intense Shakespearian-in-a-minor-key struggle why does the film end as it does, on the brink of closure, if not of the eternal father-son struggle, then of the specific dilemma at hand? On the basis of a detailed montage showinng Eliezer realizing the awful truth, the opening scene appears to be about to be re-enacted in reverse fashion. But the film simply stops (there is also a sub-plot about a mystery woman that also goes begging). Why?  I wish I had an explanation as it seems so profligate with the rich rewards that have been showered upon us to that point but I don’t.  It probably didn’t cost Footnote an Oscar (the winner, A Separation, carries a much larger emotional heft) but I expect that it will cost the film the size of audience that otherwise it well deserves.

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