Joseph Cedar's "Footnote' (2nd review)

A great footnote can grow like a stalactite, slowly depositing its wealth of reference and lore, pausing to converse with giants of the past or scold the pygmies of the present. Whole reputations can be made or lost within them, entire texts swallowed. For some scholars, the text itself is only a pretext, as it were, for the footnote.

In the case of Eliezer Shkolnik, Talmudic scholar and anti-hero of Joseph Cedar's Footnote, a single footnote is the sole reward of an entire career. Shkolnik is a philologist who has spent most of his life trying to demonstrate that medieval citations of a critical Talmudic text were based on a lost edition rather than the surviving one presumed to have been in use. This is detective work of the most painstaking kind, comparing divergences formerly attributed to scribal error.

Just as Shkolnik is about to present his findings, however, a rival scholar, Grossman, accidentally stumbles across the lost edition, publishes it and reaps the glory that (in a just world) should have gone to Shkolnik's decades of work. Grossman, who doesn't bother to acknowledge Shkolnik, becomes an instant academic celebrity, while Shkolnik remains in an obscurity lightened only by a generous footnote in his own mentor's work.

Even that, we are given to understand, was an act of charity. But it is the one crumb of praise in a disregarded life, and Shkolnik clings to it with fierce pride.

Darwin got the credit

These things happen. In 1857, a young British biologist, Alfred Russel Wallace, wrote an older colleague with the outline of a brilliant thesis on evolution by means of natural selection. Charles Darwin modestly offered to step aside and give Wallace credit for the idea on which he had been working for more than 20 years. Wallace, when he realized that Darwin was on the point of publishing a fully documented study, refused any share of the limelight. Wallace is remembered as a gentleman. Darwin is remembered as a genius.

As if his own lack of recognition isn't enough, Shkolnik bears the further indignity of his son Uriel's fame in their shared field. The film begins as he sits tensely in the audience (after nearly being barred for lack of a security bracelet) while Uriel is inducted into the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Uriel handsomely acknowledges his father's example and influence, but Shkolnik feels patronized and insulted.

Father and son are in fact different scholarly generations. Eliezer is dedicated to rigorous textual analysis, and Uriel to what is perhaps best described as cultural studies— from Eliezer's point of view, glib generalizing divorced from empirical foundation. His son's fame is in fact the last and bitterest irony of his life, since it represents the repudiation of the values by which he has lived it.

Inexplicable award

The film turns when Eliezer is suddenly— and inexplicably— awarded the Israel Prize, the country's most coveted academic honor. Even more surprising, we learn that his nemesis, Grossman, is chair of the prize committee, and that the only reason Eliezer's name has been in the competition is that it has been submitted for the past 20 years by Uriel.

Eliezer knows nothing of this latter circumstance, and Uriel presumably does know that his name, too, has been submitted. If Uriel were to have won, it would be a subtle way of triumphing over the father whose approval he can never earn, even if Uriel alone could savor the victory. In any case, Uriel duly congratulates Eliezer, though the family celebration is strained.

The trouble is that Uriel in fact is the prizewinner, and that Eliezer's notification was a clerical error. Grossman and his colleagues tell Uriel this, and leave it to him to break the news to Eliezer.

Uriel defends his father as worthy of the prize. If a mistake has been made, he says, the committee will have to live with it.

Grossman responds bluntly that Eliezer is a pedant who has contributed nothing to modern Talmudic scholarship, and that the award would be debased by giving it to him. The discussion turns heated. Uriel punches Grossman in the nose.

Devil's pact

In the end, the two men reach a Devil's pact. Eliezer will get the award, but Uriel will write the award citation, and he will also agree never to be considered for the prize he has renounced.

Neither man, however, has anticipated Eliezer's sleuthing skills. He recognizes his son's style in the citation, and puts two and two together. The prize, wrongly given him by men unworthy of bestowing it, is his by rights. And he has outfoxed his son, who lacks the smarts to hide his tracks.

Still, what should Eliezer do? Confronting his son won't undo the mess. Rejecting the prize on principle is no longer an option, because he has already signified his acceptance of it. The awards ceremony will be a mockery, but that can't be helped.

Neither father nor son will ever be able to talk about what happened; the walls of pride are far too high on both sides. Truth, the commodity of Shkolnik's profession, is of no use to him now. He must live and be remembered by a lie.

The film ends as Eliezer waits to accept the award. Some critics have complained that this is a copout, but it seems to me exactly the right choice. Eliezer will simultaneously experience the acclaim of his false triumph and the solitude of his real one. One has to imagine a moment of unbearable irony, which is best left to the imagination alone.

What would you do?

Of course, Eliezer being Eliezer, one can also imagine him doing the unthinkable, and unmasking the whole charade. It isn't a plausible scenario, but a suicide artist lurks within him, and one can just see him gleefully taking down the establishment as he goes up in flames. I think Cedar wants to leave us with this moral conundrum— what would you, the viewer, do?

Footnote invites us to reflect on the nature of public honors. On one level, prize giving is a self-validating form of publicity, a point raised again recently in the brouhaha over the non-award of a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for 2011. Even at its most exalted, in reflects fallibility, politics and fashion. True greatness crowns the awards it wins, not the other way around.

In the case of the Israel Prize, Eliezer knows that his canons of scholarship are not merely unfashionable but rejected. His award is thus in every sense of the word but one a mistake. That sense is the one in which he believes himself truly deserving of it, despite its having fallen into undeserving hands.

The award is bigger than Grossman and his miserable committee; it signifies achievement in the oldest scholarly tradition in the world, and with it the unbroken continuity of Judaism itself. If the right award is after all going to the right person, even for the wrong reasons, is there not a higher justice in that?

Genius vs. drone

Or so we can imagine Eliezer telling himself as he delivers his acceptance speech. In the perspective of the ages, it is the constant will to truth that counts, and not the folly of the hour. Eliezer is no great sage. But in his own eyes he has been a faithful servant in a time of deceit. Honor is due for that.

This situation would be far less interesting dramatically were it not for Grossman. You might surmise that his refusal to acknowledge Eliezer is based on personal guilt, and that his desire to see Uriel win the prize is a stratagem to bury Eliezer for good. But in the climactic scene with Uriel it is clear that Grossman truly believes Uriel to be the gifted, pathbreaking scholar, and Eliezer a drone stuck in textual literalism. He takes the prize as seriously as Eliezer does, and believes his responsibility to it to be no less.

So, who's in the right? We are left with no clear basis for judgment. We only know that both men are absolutely convinced of their own scholarly rectitude.

Sharp elbows

The film's core human interest is the classic story of fathers and sons. Uriel wants to please the father he has surpassed professionally, but Eliezer regards his work as shoddy, his fame undeserved and his praise condescending.

In a brilliant little scene, Eliezer is interviewed by an attractive young journalist who prods him about his criticism of his son's work methods. Eliezer is in the glow of his award; he can afford, for once, to be generous toward Uriel, or at least discreet. But the journalist persists, and he is unable to resist venting his bitterness— or speaking the truth, if the two can be distinguished.

Uriel, of course, reads Eliezer's disparaging comments in the paper just after having just gone mano a mano with Grossman to save his father's honor and, he believes, his life. This is one difficult dad.

But Uriel is no paragon either. He's a sharp-elbowed operator who extracts a not-so-subtle fealty from his academic subordinates, and whose cold relationship with his wife seems a mirror image of Eliezer's marriage. Uriel gets revenge when, awaiting his father's appearance at the award ceremony, he whispers fiercely into his mother Yehudit's ear that he is the true winner. That this news will gratuitously poison the rest of her days does not inhibit him.

Academic squabbles

There are no heroes and no villains here, just very flawed human beings in whom a crisis brings out both the best and worst. And is it all worth the fuss? Are these squabbling scholars the keepers of Judaism's sacred core, or self-important academic theologians splitting hairs?

Could be, both. If you've never thrown or taken an academic punch, though, I can tell you this: A bloody nose is the least of the damage.

The performers are all splendid, notably Lior Ashkenazi's bearishly frustrated Uriel, Micah Lowenstein's Grossman, and Aliza Rosen's long-suffering Yehudit. Yuval Scharf is very good as the girl reporter, patiently probing and sexually confrontational at the same time.

But Shlomo Bar-Aba, a stand-up comic who hadn't worked in film in 20 years, gives the kind of grim, prideful, utterly humorless yet profoundly human performance as Eliezer that perhaps only a great comedian can achieve. He's a walking Philoctetes: You can feel the wound in every step he takes. ♦


To read another review by AJ Sabatini, click here.
To read a related comment by Dan Rottenberg, click here.