Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba) dedicated 30 years of his life to meticulously cultivating an important piece of Talmudic scholarship, only to have a rival stumble across the proof of Eliezer’s hypothesis and beat Eliezer to the publicatory punch, leaving the quasi-autistic Eliezer without the acclaim he deserves. As if that wasn’t enough to embittered, that his son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) has cultivated a career garnering both intellectual and popular renown has done the trick.
That’s the setup of Footnote, whose plot pivots on the Israel Prize, one of the country’s highest civilian honors. Eliezer receives word that after 20 years he’s finally been given his academic due. Problem is, there’s been a mistake: Uriel is the true winner.
Is anything more important than truth? That’s the philosophical center of Footnote, to be sure, as Eliezer’s entire life is based on intellectual rigor and integrity. But thoughts on that theme are never fully developed. That shortcoming is forgivable, but the inconsistent rhythm of its feeling heart leaves the film a bit anemic. At times it seems as if writer/director Joseph Cedar left too much off the page (or on the cutting-room floor). He lets us into Eliezer quasi-autistic vantage point, but not enough for us to empathize; the women in Eliezer’s life are little more than phantoms onscreen; Eliezer’s rival Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewensohn) is a stuffed-shirt straw man, alluding to grudges on both sides without Cedar’s exploring them and with motivations seemingly based only on plot-point convenience.
Presumably Cedar is playing with the idea of the lacuna — the gap one often finds in ancient research while trying to fit the pieces together — but never leaves it more or less lying there. He does better with the idea of intellectual rigor by way of showing us Eliezer’s puzzling out of a philological mystery, but even this is rushed and veers too close to deus ex machina for credible comfort.
The film has some early delights that give it an air of promise. Cedar presents a string of footnotes within the film that charmingly and effectively provides us with background on the father and son and their histories. But the device never reappears, and the vibrant onscreen tone flattens, placing too much hope that Amit Poznansky’s well-orchestrated but overwrought musical arrangement (think Doctor Zhivago as comedy) will carry the film’s dynamical weight. (Poznansky does have one great moment, sharply moving from a complex bit of scoring to a single, ringing undertone.)
Footnote, billed as a comedy but providing this reviewer with a couple of chuckles in a total of one scene (a small university office with too many academics inside), was an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, and it won damn near every Israeli Film Academy Award that they gave out last year, so perhaps great filmmaking is in the eye of the beholder. Cedar has a great idea, and he hits upon some nice moments and flourishes. This should have been a fabulous film. But I don’t see it.