Movie: Footnote

Yesterday I went to see the Israeli movie Footnote for the second time.  The boys had taken me into LA to see it for my birthday, but it's playing in Long Beach now so I could sneak off for a matinee.  Click here for the trailer. 

It was sweet of the boys to take me the first time, but they made it very clear that they didn't want to see a movie about Talmud scholars more than once.  Big sissies.  I loved this movie the first time for the insights it gave me into that particular world of academia.  I have friends who live in that world, but I've never gotten to see the back life of it.  We think about this modern world of computers and the near total access that we have to certain information.  It certainly has changed the way that we study Torah.  Once I asked Rabbi Gersh a question and he answered, "Find out the same way any rabbinical student does... Google it."  But even with all of the ease that we have in searching out some information, there is still a need for the kind of mind that can pull from memory a word from a text, a kind of mind that sits in a room with books to the ceiling and can put his (gender neutral "his", I'm not going to edit my thoughts to accommodate people who can't make that leap) hand on the book with the word and flip to the page he needs.  Those are rare minds and it is amazing to see them in action.  It brings up thoughts of Rashi and Ezra and their near encyclopedic knowledge of all things Torah.

So that was what I took away from the first viewing, that and where the story goes.  When you sit down to see a film a second time, you already know it's going.  The second viewing lets you observe how it got there.

Footnote is a beautiful film.  There are layers and layers of complexity that manifest in lovely ways.  Even in the trailer there are some resounding images... the old man throwing away reams of writing in a place filled with the debris of countless other writers (somehow a shot of someone throwing away a thumb drive wouldn't give us the same emotional hit), or the son somehow accidentally ending up in a fencing costume (how better to illustrate the sparring he has stumbled into unwittingly?).  It isn't a gauzy fairy tale of a movie.  It's a movie about letters and words.  Any good movie about Talmud scholars would be though, wouldn't it?