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Joseph Cedar‘s Footnote, winner of the Best Screenplay award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and one of four runners-up to Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation for the most recent Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, is a curiously uneven depiction of a brewing father-son rivalry. It’s far from a smooth affair, in that the quite satirical comedic tone, while certainly contributing a unique humor, manages to liquify most of the potential for emotional epiphany. Patchy, too, is Cedar‘s tension within himself — as self-sufficiently word-driven as his screenplay is, he approaches the material with a very noticeable directorial personality, and it’s a decision that, creatively eager though it may be, produces mostly mixed results.

The familial pressure in Cedar‘s story stems from the opposite personalities with which the two main characters conduct themselves in the same profession — the study of Talmudic Research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Title: Footnote Sony Pictures Classics Review by: Harvey Karten Director: Joseph Cedar Screenwriter: Joseph Cedar Cast: Shlomo Bar-Aba, Lior Ashkenazi, Amiza Rosen, Micah Lewesohn, Alma Zack, Daniel Markovich, Yuval Scharf, Nevo Kimchi Screened at: Sony, NYC, 1/3/12 Opens: March 9, 2012 When Abraham seemed all-too-ready to sacrifice his son Isaac per heavenly command, we note that if he were living in our own modern times, he would be jailed for child abuse and not considered a hero for obeying the Almighty. Subjecting the intended sacrifice to free interpretation, we might conclude that the relationships of fathers to sons–especially given the updated work by Sigmund Freud–is not entirely beatific. While there...

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