Father-son academic rivalry at centre of dark comedy

Footnote

Starring: Lior Ashkenazi, Shlomo

Bar-aba, Alma Zack Playing in Hebrew with English subtitles at: AMC and Cavendish

cinemas Parents’ guide: Slow pace, one

scuffle. A lot of people liked Joseph Cedar’s latest film; I’m so-so.

I saw it at a press screening a month after A Separation, the Iranian movie that beat it out for the best foreign-language film prize at this year’s Oscars.

Maybe it’s unfair to compare them, but since they come from roughly the same part of the world and from countries that are official enemies, it’s inevitable.

Cedar, an Israeli filmmaker born and trained in New York, won the best-screenplay award at Cannes for this, his fourth feature. His last Oscar nod was in 2008, for the war movie Beaufort.

A Separation, written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, won the Golden Bear at Berlin, best foreign picture at the Golden Globes, and, unusually for a foreign film, was Oscar-nominated for best screenplay.

Both Footnote and A Separation are achingly intimate family dramas propelled by a crackling script, unexpected plot twists and some fine acting by principal and supporting players alike.

Footnote, a dark comedy about a father-son rivalry in high academia, makes more imaginative use of the camera and special effects, underscoring each wry turn with sight gags and frenetic music.

A Separation, by contrast, is a more sober affair. Depicting a clash between rich and poor over a murky case of domestic assault, it never tries to be cute, and saves the music to the very end.

Both movies are peopled by some highly unsympathetic characters: liars, hypocrites, false friends, indifferent spouses, authority figures who let others down.

But Footnote’s protagonists have a huge failing. They simply don’t evolve as characters. Mostly, they stagnate – or to use a cruder image, they stew in their own brain juice.

That’s especially true for Eliezer Shkolnik (played by Shlomo BarAba), a taciturn old grump who’s a senior scholar in Talmudic research at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.

Long ago, he did some meticulous work on ancient texts that earned him a footnote in an esteemed colleague’s book on the subject. But major recognition has eluded him.

Eliezer’s son, Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi), works in the same field but rose to more lofty heights. He’s a popular lecturer and author, someone who interprets Israel’s Biblical past for the modern age. Then comes a big announcement. One day, after years of being passed over for it, the father is told he will be awarded his country’s highest honour: an Israel Prize.

One problem, however. The prize is actually meant for Uriel.

There was a bureaucratic slipup, and the dad got the call instead of the son. What to do?

Nothing has been announced yet, so the judges ask Uriel to discreetly intervene on their behalf and break the bad news to his dad. He refuses outright, arguing that the reversal is unfair and will kill him.

How long can Uriel keep his secret? How long can he swallow his pride and, by keeping silent, honour a father who has always looked down on his work as inferior scholarship?

Not a bad recipe for situation comedy or a lecture in Ethics 101 – and it works, mostly.

The trouble is that neither father nor son is someone you feel like rooting for. Between Eliezer’s sour grapes and Uriel’s self-flattery, there’s not a lot to choose from.

As the situation develops, neither succeeds in breaking out of the mould he’s made for himself. The dad lightens up a bit when he thinks he’s getting his prize, and the son broods, but that’s it.

They do make a common enemy with a lifelong rival of the father’s, furrow-browed Professor Grossman (Micah Lewensohn), who chairs the judges’ committee, but here again the intrigue is rather listless.

I kept thinking back to A Separation, and how every time a character seemed all figured out, he or she would defy expectations and do something different. Not so, in Footnote.

The ending leaves us hanging, much like A Separation’s did, but the lack of resolution feels contrived; Cedar’s exit strategy is a cop-out.

Ultimately, we don’t really care who gets that damn prize, anyway.

So should you see Footnote? Sure.

Even if it’s ultimately much ado about very little, the movie succeeds in being entertaining and also thoughtful, perhaps to a fault. To its credit, too, there’s nary a mention of the Israeli-palestinian conflict.*

*And thank God for that.