Footnote

Or, tough Talmudder.

Footnote is one of those foreign movies that is bound to frustrate the average moviegoer with its slow-moving plot, flawed and unlikable characters, and unsatisfying resolution. Israeli director Joseph Cedar follows up his film Beaufort, about the last days of the first Israel-Lebanon war, with a very introverted movie about a father-and-son pair of Talmudic scholars.

The setup makes it sound like a comedy: father Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-abba) has been repeatedly passed over for awards and accolades, while son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) is drowning in them. The father is told he's going to receive the prestigious Israel Prize, but it turns out there's been a mistake and they actually meant to give it to the son. Hijinks follow. Self-absorbed, socially inept academics are mocked.

In reality, the few tentative madcap scenes in the movie feel dreadfully out of place, and the constant comic music is annoying. Eliezer is extremely bitter: at the beginning of the film, Uriel is being admitted to the National Academy of Sciences. The camera stays on Eliezer's miserable face during the entire scene. He can barely bring himself to applaud (literally) his son's tremendous achievement.

Admission is a key theme of the movie--it's all about who "gets in" and who doesn't. Eliezer wanders outside during the reception and the guard won't let him back in. Many scenes feature security checkpoints, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that they're in there simply because they're a fundamental feature of Israeli life, but their secondary meaning is important as well. They represent the exclusion that Eliezer feels, and on another level, that Israelis feel from the rest of the world.

Eliezer is the typical socially inept academic, but this isn't played for laughs. It quickly becomes clear through the editing that he is autistic. He is overwhelmed by situations of sensory excess and categorizes things obsessively. He comes home and puts on those earmuffs that airport workers wear to exclude the outside world–it is ironic that he craves recognition but is incapable of handling it when it comes. Cedar elegantly shows how he focuses on small details but the big picture of what's going on around him is elusive.

This ability to live in the details actually makes him a great scholar in some ways, but clearly hinders him in other ways. The tension between father and son is not just about their charisma (which Uriel has and Eliezer does not), but also about the nature of science and scholarship–to Eliezer, the new generation of scholars seem lazy, sloppy and distracted by shiny details. To the other scholars, Eliezer lacks creativity and is unproductive–his main achievement is being mentioned in a footnote by an earlier genius in the Talmudic field.

Eliezer uses the opportunity of winning the prize to lash out at his son in a spectacularly ungrateful manner, but Uriel is hardly a saint either. Towards the beginning the film takes a detour, listing random facts about both Eliezer and Uriel that help fill out their characters, and Uriel is revealed to be petty and tyrannical. It's meant to be funny, but the visual effects, which mimic the microfilm readers that the Talmudic scholars use, are distracting. 

A more interesting and less contrived window into Uriel's character is provided by his family. When Eliezer attacks Uriel, Uriel turns around and unleashes his pent-up fury on his own son Josh (Daniel Markovich). Uriel's perceptive wife Dikla (Alma Zack)  is clearly the only person who sees him for who he truly is and isn't afraid to tell him so. Dikla almost runs away with the movie–she provides a much-needed respite from the intense, cloistered world of the scholars.

Overall the herky-jerky pacing, the uncomfortable mix of comedy and drama, and the unnecessary effects bring the film down, and there are places where a lack of knowledge of Hebrew philology is a hindrance; one plot point hinges on the fact that in Hebrew, "Ezekiel" and "Uriel" begin with the same letter. But while there are some missteps, the film is neither slight nor silly–you may find that it is more interesting after the fact than in the watching. 

Plus, if you don't mind foreign films without proper resolution, you