Footnote (2011)

Joseph Cedar’s Footnote (2011) is a very different film than his Beaufort (2007; see separate blog). It’s an intimate family drama, often comic, without explicit political reference. Yet they both warn audiences against the dangers of the bunker mentality. They are, after all, Israeli films. The first film showed Israeli soldiers defending, then abandoning a fortress in Lebanon. In the second, set on the home front, the leading characters suffer from the destructive intransigence of their wills. The central figures, the famous Talmudic scholars Eliezer Shkolnik and his son Uriel, and their archenemy Grossman are so firmly set in their righteousness that they cannot countenance the compromises that could lead to justice and to peace of mind.

Indeed the film’s key word is “fortress.” In the opening awards ceremony Uriel publicly thanks his father for having made their home a cultural fortress. When Uriel secretly writes the jury’s supposed citation for his father’s mistaken award, he slips that term in again, as it frequently crops up in Uriel’s writings. That word prompts Eliezer to doubt the validity of his award — and enables him to remember that the cell-phone call informing him of the prize named his son, not him. Eliezer’s hunger for the award deafened him to his son’s name.

The settings support that term. The offices, the library, and especially both scholars’ homes are veritable fortresses of books and papers in their case dedicated to the abstruse minutiae of Talmudic studies. They live in a fortress against the realities and obligations outside. In this sense the film may allude to the problematic isolation of Israel’s burgeoning Haredim community from the responsibilities of Israeli citizenship. Especially Eliezer has lived isolated from the world. His 30-year study of the Babylonian Talmud was aborted when Grossman accidentally found the ur-text and selfishly published it. Eliezer is so blindly locked in his fortress that he insists on offering his annual lecture course though only one student has registered. Even her he treats with cruel superiority.

Uriel can be as cruel to his students and as self-righteous and arrogant as his father. “May your seedlings all be like you” is a blessing/curse cited earlier. But Uriel is an academic star. On Shavuot eve he pops up all over the city delivering six lectures. Or, one six times. Where Eliezer wears yellow headphones to drown out the outside world — i.e., his family — Uriel has become a public intellectual, a celebrity, to his father’s disdain. In his cruel treatment of his own drifting young son, even Uriel proves that the cynicism of the father is also visited upon the son. 

Although Eliezer’s parents moved to Israel in 1932, and he was born there, he seems to personify the Old Jew, Uriel the New. Eliezer is a couch cartoffle, while Uriel plays a mean, very mean, game of squash. Eliezer is resigned to being the Victim, having lost the Israel Prize 20 years running. His life-work has been reduced to a footnote — and that, according to Grossman, proffered out of pity. When Uriel is victimized — the theft of his clothing in the gym — he responds with stylish bravado, exiting in a fencer’s uniform, assuming the aristocratic bearing of the German/Austrian enemy. 

In contrast, Eliezer bristles when the security guard asks him to bare his wrists — he reads the blue entry bracelets as if they were tattooed numbers. As in Beaufort, the Israeli security guard’s German shepherd evokes the concentration camps. As Eliezer approaches his own award ceremony at the end, he seems completely dissociated from the surreal business around him — costumed dancers, drummers, the paraphernalia of a televised awards show — especially the puffs of gas-like vapour as the winners approach the stage. Though he was spared the Nazi nightmare this Old Jew assumes its psychological scars and its indelible memories — and responds to every slight with aggressive belligerence. 

The men’s contrast extends to their wives. Eliezer’s wife is a strong, submissive support. She doesn’t express her pain at Eliezer’s newspaper slander of their son. When Uriel whispers that Eliezer really did not win the award, he leaves her with a remarkable burden. She keeps the secret but silently slips into her husband’s bed with him, in tacit support. Uriel’s wife is lithe, does yoga, and dares to correct him for attacking their son. In the most chilling show of Uriel’s shallow power, the nurse massaging his pregnant wife talks across her to praise his public performances. Even at this moment their marriage is all about him, as Eliezer’s is always about him. 

In Eliezer’s survey the definitions of “fortress” range down from security and shield to trap. Both men are trapped by their shields against each other. But where Uriel annually nominates his father for the Israel Prize and fights to let him keep it after the mistaken announcement, Eliezer uses the newspaper interview to attack his more famous son’s academic standing. The incident is titled his revenge. His behaviour gives the lie to his Talmudic quote, that no man can be jealous of his son or his student. His studies don’t apply to him or his life.

The family visit to Fiddler on the Roof leaves Eliezer complacently humming “Tradition,” while his son seethes in anger and his wife is pained by knowing of her husband’s delusion. Eliezer obviously missed the play’s thrust, which is the fiddler’s delicate balance on the rooftop trying to modulate his Tradition to deal with the changing world. For Eliezer tradition remains an indomitable fortress.

Casting Micah Lewensohn as Grossman provides a marvellous metaphor. His densely furrowed brow looks like the wrinkles of a brain. As his brain seems visible through his skull and skin, he presents the image of transparency. Transparency is his primary virtue, he claims, as he refuses on principle to let the mistaken award stand. But he is equally transparent in his righteousness and in his malice. In their furious exchange, when Grossman warns Uriel not to force him to divulge something a son should not know, we have a hint at the source of his long hatred of Eliezer. There must have been a woman between them — perhaps the elderly archivist to whom Eliezer brings first word of his supposed award, and whom we later see at his celebrations. 

Uriel’s meeting with the awards committee is the film’s most resonant scene. It begins with telling comedy: the room is so small, so crammed with chairs and people, that any movement is a problem. The image of people jammed together in too small a space clearly indicates that whatever other themes and issues the film may examine, it is crucially about Israel — the sliver of land surrounded by the sea and the massive nations of antagonists bent upon driving the Jews into it. In a space so small there is no room for such heated and profoundly protracted differences. Yet in that small space the conflicts persist. The space filled with chairs is also filled with egos, with fortresses, the characters determined to defend their principles to the end. Uriel properly challenges Grossman on the amount of anger and violence caused by his intransigent defence of his Truth. In that jam no compromise is possible.  But in the freer confines of Grossman’s office/fortress, Uriel manages to draw out a painful and expensive resolution. 

The space theme spreads beyond that room. Eliezer and Uriel are academically jammed into a minuscule area of scholarship. Eliezer constantly makes himself an outsider, getting trapped outside his son’s award ceremony, walking beside the family car, standing apart in family photos. Grossman is ramming together his garbage cans when he calls to Eliezer his unwelcome Mazel tov on Uriel’s success.   

     Once Eliezer realizes the award was intended for Uriel, not him, he drifts to the ceremony as if at sea. We don’t know whether he will accept the award — in validating a lie, he would violate his most essential ethic — or publicly explain why he is denying it. Perhaps he drifts detached because he doesn’t know either. Cedar doesn’t tell us. The film close on the TV host’s instruction to rise for Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem. That confirms that the film’s family drama and the academic politics are but metaphors for the nation’s predicament. We don’t learn Eliezer’s decision because we don’t know which way Israel’s vehemently divided patriotisms will go. We don’t hear the anthem but we know its powerful sway. Perhaps the clash of too rigid and righteous fortresses, each with its own ardent truth, risks reducing the national project to a footnote. 

Jersey Boys

Despite being an adaptation of someone else’s musical stage show, Jersey Boys emerges a very personal Clint Eastwood film. In particular it recalls the themes of his most personal and powerful film, Unforgiven.

As the four members of the group slip outside their scene to address the audience directly, the film treats memory and the collision of its participants’ different perspectives. Detailing the group’s tensions, their personal and collective failures and resurrections, the film also replays the gap between the legend and the reality. The love songs pour out of characters who don’t meet the responsibilities inherent in love.

As usual Eastwood explores the male world — the fraternity of boys, pranksters, partiers and betrayers and the high price the women pay for the men to stay free. Frankie tells his mistress how important his wife and family are to him but we witness his neglect, his wife’s consequent disintegration and his loss of his daughters. His marriage begins with his seduction at first sight by wiseacre Mary, who tells him to find a nickel: “Call your mother, you’re going to be home late.” He will disappoint the once frivolous Mary’s sense of family responsibility.  

The investigation of manhood is explicitly focused in Frankie Valli’s sacrifices to meet his — albeit partial, non-familial — ethical code and in the group’s song Walk Like a Man. The group’s hardass mobster patron weeps at his mother’s favourite song. The gay producer is unquestioningly accepted at a time “when people thought Liberace was just theatrical.” The musicians live the same kind of demanding code that the gangsters here do and as the heroes of Eastwood’s cop and cowboy morality plays do. The prize lyricist is celebrated for losing his virginity — which starts with the woman turning off the TV show, Rawhide, starring a young Clint Eastwood. For the character to become a man, that is, the director’s younger self is revived but to be turned off. 

That moment anticipates the smash finale, where Oh What a Night is performed by the whole cast, including wives, girlfriends, bit players, and even the old song and dance man himself, Christopher Walken (see Hardass Mobster above), as they appeared earlier, i.e., younger. In fact, art — whether the recorded songs or the movie or their legend — makes them eternally young. Performers may age and even die but their art gives them a kind of immortality — like the legendary survival of Bill Munney in the rumoured form of San Francisco merchant. Whatever happened to old Bill Munney, even the much older young Rowdy Yates lives on. The grey-haired singers reunite for their Hall of Fame concert and without rehearsal slip into their old routine — which recovers their younger images. Thanks to Eastwood’s familiar meticulous sense of detail, the buried past social reality is also brought back to convincing life.

As in the traditional musical biopic the songs are made to grow out of the characters’ emotional experiences and tribulations. That is, they are not just constructions but pointed expressions. Frankie Valli brings new depth and emotional breadth to the composer of Short Shorts, Bob Gaudio. In the continuing dance between art and life, Steven Schirripa’s appearance as a barber evokes The Sopranos, in which Frankie Valli enjoyed an afterlife as a non-singing character. Actor Joe Pesci is portrayed as a hustling talent agent, who later employs the group’s destructive Tommy Devito. 
     Finally, the film often shades into poetry. Perhaps its liveliest metaphor pops up in the early heist scene. The lads shove a huge, heavy safe into a car trunk. Its weight lifts the front wheels off the ground as the car screams off into a shop window. That image — a speeding car with the front wheels high off the ground — is a perfect emblem for Frankie Valli’s brilliant falsetto career. He sings high but propelled — which eventually saves him from the life of crime and failure that scene emblematizes.

Beaufort (2007)

Though the predominant effect in Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort (2007) is claustrophobic dread and futility, the film is enlivened by telling details.

Two visitors frame the narrative, the soldier sent to defuse a road bomb and the soldier sent to blow-up the Beaufort bunker, to leave nothing to Hizbollah. One item that survives the explosion is the metal sheet listing the soldiers killed in the original — and apparently unnecessary — battle to win the castle. Whatever the war does it can’t undo the loss of its soldiers’ lives, nor their memory. The project to blow up the bunker is called Back to the Future. The dynamiter imagines a soldier returning to that landscape and pointing out, amid the revived Edenic greenery, where the old bunker and its parts once stood. But won't the land remain as scarred as the soldiers? This paradise once lost can't be regained. You can't undo a war, at least not in the individual soldier. 

The remote officers’ disconnect from the soldiers recurs. The bomb-defuser is killed by a land mine near his target. His father on TV regrets never having taught his son fear, to preserve himself for his loving family. But the soldier knew fear. He originally resolved the bomb was too dangerous to approach. His commander overruled him, sending him to an unnecessary death. Indeed, the road is paved over anyway, so the fatal defusing attempt was unnecessary. With Hezbollah threatening to slaughter the remaining soldiers and their fort wired to explode, the remote commanders still order the battalion to remain there another night. As the loyal bomb sniffing dog is considered “a weapon,” so are the soldiers reduced to impersonal weapons to the distant command.

The film hints at the life these men could rather be living. When the first visitor gives a soldier some liquorice from Holland — not kid stuff but salty, strong — Cedar holds for over 10 seconds on the soldier inexpressively enjoying it. Like the white soccer ball that redundantly appears in a photo pose with the soldiers who brought the explosives, it’s a reminder of the joys these men could and should be living rather than fulfilling a dubious mission beyond their country’s borders. So, too, when the soldiers joke about one man’s American girlfriend, another soldier appears illuminated in the doorway behind, stripped to his shorts, a fleshly image of the flesh denied. The men’s bleak situation admits glimpses of the life outside. 

So, too, the film is drained of colour. Much is black and white, like the old American trench films of the Korean War, much in sepia, with occasional flashes of colour to remind us that these men’s lives have been reduced in their palette.

We don’t see any enemy. We hear their missiles and see their terrible effects, but we don’t see them. Nor does Cedar present any of the reasons why Israel went into Lebanon in 1982, e.g., to drive back the PLO that had been firing into Israel, the hope of working through to a peace treaty with Lebanon, etc. The enemy and the reasons for the war thus seem irrelevant. As a character stated in Time of Favour, Cedar’s point is that in war one fights oneself more than an enemy. In both films the characters’ alienation and misery play out amid the welcoming of the sabbath, a paradoxical discord.

When our heroes finally do escape they are welcomed by troops in a row of trucks that evoke our older images of the concentration camp trains. But now the Jewish soldiers are no longer victims to the outside world — but to their own commanders. The new Jew, the Israeli Jew, is a rugged, often blond, assertive force, antithetic to the traditional shrinking victim. In the bomb sniffer the Jews run their own German shepherd.

The hero, the young battalion commander, lives up to his reputation for character, virtue and judgment. By refusing to violate his instructions to remain in danger an extra night, by fulfilling his mission, he redeems himself for earlier having frozen, unable to run out to retrieve a wounded comrade. This brave leader, then, learned fear but also learned to overcome it. 

In the last shot he has stripped off his layers of armour and clothing and kneels in the road, weeping. He’s home at last, free at last, but behind him slightly out of focus the horizon line is actually a barbed wire fence still sealing him off. This is, after all, Israel, where whatever principle you espouse, whatever ideal you advance, you’re still a nation threatened with annihilation by every neighbour around — and a good many citizens within. Maybe you can’t afford your ideals — but you can’t afford to lose them.
    Like any historic fiction, Beaufort is not primarily about the time in which it is set (Israel, 2000) but about the time in which it is made (Israel, 2007). Like the best, however, it's equally effective as a reflection of the time in which the film is viewed. The wasting of the noblest lives in warfare, the fatal folly of undertaking to claim and defend outposts beyond your borders, the pathetic destructiveness of a bunker mentality — these themes still speak to audiences not just in Israel but well beyond. As in his visit to the planned attack on Temple Mount in Time of Favour and his critique of the early settlers movement in Campfire, Cedar proves Aristotle’s subordination of history — which records what happened merely once — to fiction — which discovers recurrent truths everywhere and always. Wherever there is the urge to war there will be a Beaufort. And oh, what a waste of heroes. 

Chef

Jon Favreau’s Chef resonates as a unifying address to the divided American political scene. 

It speaks to the liberal (at least theoretically, Democrat) side as an allegory of the artist who needs to sustain his personal vision and individuality in the face of conformist and capitalist pressures. Carl (Favreau)’s career suicide begins when his boss (Dustin Hoffman) forces him to serve the visiting food critic the conventional menu instead of letting him free his inspiration. The chef’s predicament mirrors Jon Favreau’s dilemma as a film director, torn between making personal statements like this film or Made  and the commercial blockbusters like his Iron Man franchise and the quirkier Cowboys and Aliens. Carl's fumbling with the new social media provides another example of the dangers in a mass address.

The film speaks to the Republican ethos by showing a largely Latin American community working very hard to get ahead in America, exulting in their self-sufficiency, not looking for handouts. There is very little government interference with Carl’s new food truck business. The friendly cop is no lumbering bureaucracy. 
      Carl’s relationship with his ex-wife Inez (Sofia Vergara) makes no sense psychologically or chemically but it encapsulates the country’s ethnic diversity and its historic dependence upon a influx of immigrants. Favreau’s latent Jewishness evokes the first wave of American immigration, Inez’s Cuban glitter the current one. The film’s predominantly Cuban score confirms this celebration, as do the feel-good romantic ending and the sensual delight of the food scenes.

Both the art and the self-sufficient immigrant themes converge in the film’s emphasis on community connection. The chef shouldn’t go off on a personal campaign (Hold the sweetbreads) but has to connect to the audience, his market. So Carl revives his career — and as it happens his first family — by dedicating his food truck to Cuban street cuisine. The promise of Cuban sandwiches mobilizes the reluctant workmen to help the gringo. Moving from posh restaurant to food truck recovers the most elementary principle, preferring hearty folk cuisine over the posh restaurant’s precious designer morsels. When Carl, funded by his ex-enemy critic (Oliver Platt), opens a new posh restaurant at the end it escapes the stigma of his first establishment by keeping his dedication to the people’s cuisine. The miniature of his food truck shows Carl has not forgotten his roots. 
     Of course the key reconnection is familial. Carl’s journey salvages his relationship with his son — and through that Inez. It returns Carl to the freer, sambaing and passionate spirit that presumably first attracted her. She even helps him work the truck. As his waitress girlfriend (Scarlett Johansson) reminded him, he was not happy in his initial situation. Perhaps the corpulent Carl’s fascination with the dancing/singing skeleton, Mister Bonejangles, reveals his sense that he has lost his inner being. That he rediscovers and liberates when he hits the road with his buddy and his son with a populist immigrant menu. The chef recovers his inner cook.

Campfire (2004)

Joseph Cedar’s Campfire takes the 2004 perspective on the West Bank settlements as they were approached in 1981. Hindsight exposes the ostensible idealism behind the settlement movement as a violent, aggressive macho strut.

The foreground story of a one-year widow Rachel, her sexually active and angry daughter Esti and her blossoming teen Tami (who narrates), reflects upon the background story of an ideologically based new settlement planned for the windy desert near Ramallah. Seeking some assurance of community, Rachel is determined to move with her daughters to that settlement, despite its committee’s reluctance to admit a manless family who can’t contribute to the guard duties. Only Rachel’s long friendship with the commune’s chief Motkeh’s wife gains her even tentative acceptance.

The high-blown principles of the settlement are exposed by Motkeh’s callous response to Tami’s sexual assault at the festival bonfire. The rough, vicious boys and Motkeh’s own hypocritical son reveal a lawlessness and macho bullying underneath the settlement’s pretences. That confirms the film’s first theme, the vulnerability of women, from Rachel hiding her husband’s death from potential car-buyers, to the settlement committee’s doubts about her, to the boys’ abuse of Tami, which moves from verbal to physical and back to the verbal slander of the graffiti. 

The arid macho wind of the settlement — in men and boys alike — contrasts to the softness of the bus driver Yossi, who admits to Rachel he’s a virgin and to Tami that he may lack what it takes ever to marry. When he takes Rachel on a dinner date in his empty bus it’s an emblem of a community resource, awaiting fulfilment. His use of his job on a date improves from the contrast to the cantor’s burst of Kol Nidrei on the hotel steps on his first date with Rachel.

With all the men in kipahs Cedar frames out the secular Israel. This film is about the religious aspirants and their suspect attitude toward the isolation and loss among its citizenry. In both the cantor’s Kol Nidrei and his choral lead bemoaning the people’s pathetic condition, viewed from the heavens, the vanity of the singer swamps the submission of the song. Hence the poetic justice when he steps in the cow dung on the settlement’s tour with Yossi. So, too, the military’s representation by two soldiers, Esti’s uniformed beau, who shows respect for her mother and accepts Esti’s restraints, and the out-of-uniform boor who has no friends his own age so hangs out with the young boys and violates Tami. Any man’s army is ambivalent like that.  
     Despite Motkeh’s communitarian pretensions and the cantor’s false modesty and religious pretences, the effective hero is Yossi. He immediately appreciates Rachel more deeply than even her long-term friends do. He means his offer of a bus ride whenever she needs, no strings attached. He’s comfortable with her daughters but feels no need to impress them. As he revives the family’s dead battery, he restores Rachel’s warmth and openness and in general provides a humanity and respect the settlement organizers lack. In the last scene the bus driver sits with Tami in the back seat while Esti drives the family car, her mother at her side. Yossi’s unpretentious service is the film’s dominant value. A modest but sincere personal commitment trumps the more problematic claims of the organized new community.