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.