Footnote

 הערת שוליים‎ He'arat Shulayim (Footnote) 2011 Israel (103 minutes) written and directed by Joseph Cedar.

This movie is a family affair that feels as though it is about a lot of things besides a successful academic’s difficult relations with his unsuccessful academic father and his non-academic son.

The story is set in contemporary Jerusalem. Professor Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba), the father, and Professor Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), the son, are secular professors of Talmud studies. The Talmud is the classic body of Jewish civil law and ceremonial tradition derived from the first five books of the Old Testament.

The narrative works something like a scholar parsing variant readings and sources to establish a definitive recension, in this instance limning the characters and history of this father and son.

The movie opens with a camera close-up on the impassive face of Eliezer Shkolnik as his son gives a speech at his induction into the Israel Academy of the Sciences.

Uriel Shkolnik is in his prime. He is a successful, much published and popular professor, respected by his senior colleagues as ‘one of them,’ attractive to women and thus on all counts envied and resented by his academic contemporaries. Eliezer takes pride in the abstract concept of his son’s ‘success’, though he disparages the things on which this success is based.

In his acceptance speech, Uriel gives credit to his teachers and mentors, chief among which his father. He tells the audience that as a small boy he had had to enter his father’s profession on a school form, and that Eliezer, then a university professor, insisted that he put down simply that he was a ‘teacher,’ and that Uriel had been proud to do so.

But this story turns out to have been a sentimental speaker’s anecdote. We hear Uriel later tell his wife Dikla (Alma Zack) that Eliezer insisted all along that he was a philologist, and that he did not see what business the school had asking about his profession in the first place. In the end, Uriel never turned in the form.

Eliezer and Uriel don’t speak as adults. It seems even less likely that Eliezer, who appears to communicate only with sympathetic colleagues and his few students, ever had much to say to his son—or his wife Yehudit (Aliza Rosen). Rosen and Zack play nicely understated and nuanced supporting roles as the wives.

The received version goes that Eliezer is a ‘brave scholar’ who refused to bend to the prevailing winds. In contrast, Uriel is a ‘coward’ who played the game and succeeded thereby—albeit guiltily in the long wake of his father’s lack of success.

According to the recital, the young scholar and researcher Eliezer believed that by closely analyzing thousands of texts of the Talmud for homeoteleutons, or scribal errors and omissions—a process akin to carding fiber to remove impurities prior to spinning into thread—it would be possible to establish a definitive text of the Jerusalem Talmud closest to the ancient original. This obsession occupied thirty years of his life.

But just as he was preparing his magnum opus for publication, Professor Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewensohn), his lifelong rival, discovered an entire early Jerusalem Talmud text in the binding of a medieval book in a European monastery library and rushed it into publication ahead of Eliezer.

This academic coup de théâtre purportedly made Grossman’s career and ruined Eliezer’s, whose only claim to fame is his mention in the footnote of a scholarly book by Eliezer’s and Grossman’s teacher and mentor, Professor Yonah Naftali Feinstein—the ‘footnote’ of the film’s title.

Thereafter, the proud and disdainful, insulted and injured Eliezer apparently literally scattered his work to the wind. He continued private research and taught the handful of students interested in what he calls ‘mapping the branches of text versions of the Talmud,’ while Grossman accumulated academic gravitas and authority, and later Uriel enjoyed his own [guilty] academic success.

There is a big hole in this story, though. Eliezer gets far too much mileage out of his pose of ineffably noble scholarship unjustly wronged. One would think that a work of the scope, depth and uniqueness that Eliezer’s purportedly was should stand on its own as a valuable contribution to scholarship, regardless of Grossman or anyone else’s showmanship.

The rub comes when a bureaucratic screw-up prompts the Minister of Education to call Eliezer to congratulate him for winning the prestigious Israel Prize—and a newspaper publishes the leaked news—when the award actually went to Uriel.

Eliezer had been passed over for the prize in each of the past nearly twenty years that Uriel, true to the family narrative, dutifully had recommended him for it. Uriel also had asked his colleagues not to nominate him for the prize while Eliezer was a candidate. Someone on the committee selected Uriel anyway.

Grossman and the Pharisees summons Uriel to a secret meeting round a table in a supply closet in the expansive Ministry of Education to work out how to resolve this dilemma in the film’s pivotal and most remarkable scene: seven heavy hitters whose very ‘heaviness’ is belied by this ridiculously small space.

Their decision sets up the film’s dénouement.

Father and son employ their formidable skills, working simultaneously without the other’s knowledge, each in his own way, to sift the personal facts from the variant readings and sources. In a sense, Uriel’s ‘guilt’ is his saving grace: it shows him his own pose for what it is and spares him from taking himself too seriously. And Eliezer? What they find—and their true characters—will determine how they respond.

The film ends as it begins, at an award ceremony: the moment is just before the ‘moment of truth,’ but the whole story is told.