Review of Footnote (2011) by Joshua H — 07 May 2012

Uriel and his father Eliezer are both Talmudic scholars at a university in Jerusalem. Uriel is popular among his colleagues and has won many awards. Eliezer has been bitter for years due to his lifelong research project having been rendered irrelevant just as he was about to publish it. He's unabashedly jealous of his son's success and doesn't think it's deserved since he, himself, has been passed over year after year despite doing work that he considers far more serious.

Thus, you can imagine Eliezer's joy when he gets a phone call out of the blue telling him that he's just been selected to receive the most prestigious award of them all, the Israel award, at a big upcoming ceremony. As Eliezer is busy basking in the glow of finally getting the recognition he deserves, Uriel gets a call explaining that it was all a big mix-up and the award is actually going to be given to him.

Now I know what you're probably thinking: not another movie about the rivalry between father and son Talmudic scholars!

Believe it or not, I actually saw this movie willingly, despite having seen a preview for it and having a pretty good idea of what it was about. I had wrongly assumed, however, that the father was actually a sympathetic character, a doddering old bushy-browed geezer whose feelings no one wants to hurt. Not even close. He's a nasty old bile-spewing curmudgeon with a chip on his shoulder the size of a Torah scroll.

"Footnote" has a distractingly incongruous soundtrack, often utilizing what I can best describe as the Looney Tunes tiptoe music, the sort of thing you'd expect to hear accompanying Elmer Fudd's footsteps as he sneaks up behind Bugs Bunny. "Dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee" as Uriel walks down the hall in the university. I almost expected Elmer to come jumping out of a doorway to tell him to be "vewy vewy quiet". What in the hell was the director thinking?

It also has a couple of oddball scenes which I'm guessing were supposed to be funny. At one point Uriel has his street clothes stolen while he's showering at the gym so goes home wearing a borrowed fencing outfit, including, for some reason, the headgear, which conveniently allows him to spy unrecognized on his father. There was dead silence in my theater as this scene transpired but I found myself wondering if maybe it had them rolling in the aisles in Tel Aviv.

I had time to do a lot of random wondering during this film because so many of the scenes are downright dull. At the core of the story is the somewhat interesting father-son relationship but it's couched in the bone-dry world of Talmudic academia. Making matters worse, two out of the three main characters (the chairman of the awards committee being the third) are extremely unlikable and the story-telling technique leaves one wondering if perhaps they dozed off and missed a few scenes.

In summary, this film didn't do vewy much for me, I'm afwaid.