As an academic satire, Israel’s Oscar-nominated “Footnote” can’t match the dueling-Proust-scholars subplot of “Little Miss Sunshine,” but then again, not many films genuinely merit the adjective Talmudic.
Eliezer Shkolnik is a long-suffering Jerusalem academic (a “philologist,” he sometimes insists, on the rare occasions when he expects anyone to understand what that means). He spent 30 years working on a point of Talmudic inquiry, only to have his glory stolen by another professor whose findings rendered Eliezer’s work moot.
His career high point is that he was once thanked in a more illustrious academic’s footnote.
As played with a wonderfully unwelcoming air by Shlomo Bar Aba, Eliezer appears not to have smiled since graduate school, and at the start of the film we learn why, in an excruciating long take. The camera stays on him, and his underreaction, as his son, also a professor, accepts an honor amid an applauding audience and takes to the podium to give an address.
The problem is that Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) is himself an eminent academic, in the same field. Someday, perhaps, he could even win the award for which his father aches — the career-capping Israel Prize.
“Footnote,” which was written and directed by a New York-born Israeli, Joseph Cedar, spins around in a frantic and ungainly whimsy in its early stages (and pushes an absurdly bombastic score throughout), but once it calms down and stops trying to be funny, it turns into a thoughtful and intriguing drama.
Professors argue over a contemporary Talmudic moral dilemma with great care (and emotion), each of them making valid points. Which ought to come first: truth or family? Under what circumstances would you give up all future claims to an important award you have earned?
A puckish compromise that appears to solve the dilemma instead sows slow-growing discord between father and son. A climax cleverly illustrates how a gift for close textual analysis might actually be useful in making ordinary, everyday life give up its secrets.
The open ending confirms that, in the noble tradition of Jewish scholarship, the film is more about questions than answers. But sometimes the questions are the point.