Footnote

Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.The halls of academia are rarely used as film settings unless the point is to mock and subvert (or the school in question is just being used as picturesque backdrop for a sequel slasher's rampage). No problem there, as many university departments' maze-like bureaucracies, petty personal politics, and to-the-death arguments over the most abstruse subjects tend to strike even bookish types as absurd at best. (Unless the film is set in high school or grade school, in which case the mood is either comic hijinks or earnest morality tale; we seem to lose respect for education the more advanced it becomes.) Joseph Cedar's high-toned Israeli comedy about an embarrassing scandal in the world of Talmudic scholarship is overflowing with coolly-delivered mockery, but tempers it by delving deeper into the tense father-son relationship at the center of the scandal. Shot in sky-bright blues and backed with a richly emotive score, this is a rich banquet of a film, even if the final course leaves you wanting.

Eliezer Skolnick (Shlomo Bar Aba) is a sour-faced old goat of a researcher, so set in his ways that he doggedly insists on teaching a university course that only one student signed up for. Cedar's cheeky introduction gives us Eliezer's bio in quick strokes: a stolid academic who contentedly spent decades digging into the microscopic linguistic gradations between different ancient Torahs, only to have his research usurped at the last minute by a rival. Now sidelined as a crank, Eliezer trudges along the same route to work everyday and buries himself in his study at night, drowning out the world with a pair of headphones (which completes the picture of him as a near-autistic). When he gets a phone call saying he's been given the Israel Prize, the country's highest award, it's a shocking reversal, lighting hope in the crank that he's finally being noticed instead of those intellectuals he considers lightweights (i.e., nearly everybody else but him).

At the opposite end of things is one of those seeming lightweights, Eliezer's son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi in the role that will be given to Alfred Molina if there's an American remake). A full-of-life figure with twinkling eyes and a friendly beard, Eliezer is the sort of popular academic always lecturing somewhere, surrounded by the fawning. The warm-seeming Uriel's thin tolerance of his father's cold and shuttered nature evinces a churlish side that's more like his father's than he'd admit. A fellow professor notes Uriel's brilliance but warns a colleague that Uriel "expects a kind of constant and mild flattery." His dual nature is harshly tested when the Israel Prize committee calls him to resolve an urgent problem: they called Eliezer by mistake; the prize was supposed to go to Uriel. At first, Uriel thinks the right thing is to be magnaminous and let his father take the prize, but the demands of the wildly petty committee wear on him, as does Eliezer's barely-concealed contempt. Writer/director Cedar's film is in some ways all setup, with little payoff - not unlike his 2007 war drama Beaufort, which served practically as a schematic for its tightly-observed military outpost. Without much desire for a classic dramatic arc, he spends much of the film's time charting the paralleled lives of this passively competitive father and son, and the exasperations of all those who try and make do in their shadows. There's a lot of sharply observed satire here amidst the family drama, even if some of the touches verge on the obvious (the scene with a confused Uriel being blocked from reentering an event being too apparent a metaphor for his shunning by the establishment). Though he ably handles the task of lampooning these self-important academics while also celebrating the rich worthiness of their work, Cedar can't quite figure out how to resolve everything. But Amit Poznansky's winking, old-fashioned music brings a circus-like tone to the film that highlights all of Cedar's off-handed, observational humor so beautifully played by the casually brilliant cast.  

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