Footnote

Overview

It's rare that films about academics crop up, and when they do, they're often quick to reinvoke the old 'tenure or not tenure' narrative that apparently absorbs every minute of the lives of the US professoriate. But Joseph Cedar's Hearat Shulayim (Footnote) — a less-than-completely serious side glance at one man's luckless engagement with the Israeli academe — doesn't traipse the same hackneyed cloisters.

Cedar's film zooms in on one of the many execrable episodes that seem to stalk the life of elder Talmud scholar, Eliezer 'I'm a philologist!' Shkolnik (played by Shlomo Bar Aba), episodes which seem to have combined to generate the inscrutably scornful and yet somewhat muted father figure to whom we are introduced in the first half-minute of the story. Eliezer, who regards as his most glorious career achievement the citation he received in a footnote of a late professor's major work, is a world-wearied and tortured soul, and it is actually his most damaging career defeat — rather than his beloved 'footnote' — that propels his tortured performances.

As we learn, some time ago a colleague of Eliezer's, one Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewensohn), discovered a sacred version of the Talmud, the very existence of which Eliezer had himself spent 30 years postulating in preparation for the publication of this great hypothesis. By publishing his findings before Eliezer, Grossman effectively hijacked Eliezer's own opportunity to stake a claim in the find. While Eleizer never recovered from this personal tragedy, the career of his professor son, Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), is in full flight (much to the elder's envy). The plot bloats when, in an ironical error, the education ministry calls Eliezer and awards him with the venerable Israel Prize. The elder Shkolnik is elated and, quick to adopt a new attitude, the mute scholar becomes unblocked, talking down his son's work in interviews and aggrandising himself at every turn. Little does this newly lofty scholar know that the intended awardee was in fact the son he's just belittled.

Nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film, and winning the Cannes Film Festival's Best Screenplay award, Footnote deftly echoes, in narrating the dynamics of a tense father-son dyad, the mode in which texts like the Talmud reveal their own historical wisdom. Understanding Uriel's and Eliezer's relationship and their different approaches to fatherhood and to the scholarly life entails weighing different ideas about justice, retribution and the importance of intellectual work.

Cedar's film, heavy with comedic references to Jewish language — it's in Hebrew, and there's plenty of kvetching — as well as to Jewish scholarship (there's a great line about Emmanuel Levinas) is smart satire at its most thoughtful and persuasive. While it is at times a little overdetermined — there's a few too many cutesy, bombastic visual effects — the film remains a tasteful, attentive and original portrait of the austere and intensely vocational existences of those who seek special knowledge. More than this, though, Footnote tunes in to the often unacknowledged reverberations that structure the strikingly different ways in which different generations think about the same subjects, including family, wisdom, fortune and divinity.