A professor seen in a stark, extreme close-up is eloquently screaming at an academic body as they threaten to revoke a prize they’ve given the professor’s father. It’s one of “Footnote’s” most intense moments.
But there’s an underlying joke, a footnote if you will. Director Joseph Cedar has put these people into a shoebox-sized room, one that requires people to stand and juggle chairs to even open the door. It’s hard to not see all this as Earth shattering when the stakes are so low.
The Israeli film “Footnote” is a clever, intellectual comedy with an enormous scale, but one that remains aware of how trivial it all seems.
It tells the story of a father and son academic of Talmudic Studies. The son, Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), has just been inducted into the Academy of Israeli Sciences while his father, Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba), sits uncomfortably just off stage as he’s been overlooked yet again.
In two breathtakingly studious scenes, we learn how deeply Eliezer is jealous of his son and his accomplishments. We see it in the disturbed expressions on his face and the empty seat beside him during Uriel’s acceptance speech, and we see it again as a security guard both literally and figuratively asks Eliezer who he is and what he lacks.
You see, Eliezer worked all his life studying a version of the Talmud only to have his work made entirely obsolete mere weeks before he was ready to publish his findings. We learn all this in a deliciously exciting and stylized sequence that flutters through Eliezer’s and Uriel’s life story as though it were told on microfiche. We get juicy, encyclopedic details about each characters’ quirks, failures and achievements through animation, pop-up figures and an urgent, Bernard Hermann-esque score. It’s such a visually impressive sequence from a previously stately movie, you wouldn’t think it had it in it.
That’s the overall message behind “Footnote.” Beneath our surface level of understanding of people and things, there are interesting underlying footnotes of life that can provide for some of the most intimate and intense moments of rippling tension.
The whole film boils over into something magnificently exciting when Eliezer is awarded the coveted Israel Prize. He’s been rejected for the past 20 years and is overwhelmed. But the governing body made a severe mistake and meant to award the prize to Uriel.
It gets at the dilemma of trying to respect someone by following in their footsteps and being even better than them. Uriel has a devastating line to his own deadbeat son that reflects his own complicated emotions with his father: “I am a millimeter away from where I stop helping you and just want to see you suffer so I can gloat.”
The latter is the point where Uriel and Eleziel are at. The two are in such close professions and even share scenes, but we rarely see them exchange dialogue. Cedar gets at the underlying apprehension and hatred running between them as he establishes little academic games in which each one tries to prove who is the better researcher by best understanding the other. Rarely are films so in-tuned to the way academic study works.
So much of “Footnote” is wickedly smart and grave while maintaining an aloof sense of humor. It’s sad to see the film devolve into exasperated surrealism in its last 20 minutes. But maybe all academic study eventually gets beyond the realm of normal understanding.
3 ½ stars