If you learn one thing from the documentary Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story, it’s that the title character was a poster boy for patriotism. The movie tells you this so many times, in fact, that you can probably enter it for a five-minute portion and walk away with this theme.
The eldest brother of Israel’s current prime minister and a top 20 finalist in a 2005 poll of the greatest Israelis of all time, Netanyahu was a model soldier who died tragically in Operation Entebbe, the 1976 hostage-rescue mission carried out by his country’s secret defense unit. I’m not spoiling anything here; the film reveals as much in the prologue.
Using stock footage and English-language interviews with his friends, colleagues and family (yes, including Bibi), the movie reconstructs Yoni’s life story in a manner that is as predictable as a sunset, making the staid formulae of public-television documentaries appear radical by comparison. A long 84 minutes, Follow Me is repetitive, sentimental and hagiographic — the cinematic equivalent of an authorized biography, bleached of controversy and swelling with one-note admiration for its subject.
Just to be clear on this, I’m not criticizing Yoni, or his brother, or Israel. The film makes an abundantly clear case for Yoni’s inclusion in the history books and the hearts and minds of millions. His military fortitude is unquestionably inspiring: He was an academic who eschewed a plum life as a Harvard student to fight for his homeland, sacrificing any and all romantic relationships for his country.
As the film’s many audio excerpts from his letters testify, he was immersed in war while maintaining a strikingly poetic distance from it (“War is hanging over my head like a swollen balloon,” was one literate example). Chances are, average Israelis will embrace this film with a nationalistic fervor, and probably choke back tears through a number of scenes.
Which is all fine. But let’s not kid ourselves into pretending that Follow Me is anything more than an educational video for an Israeli museum or a Jewish day school, like the artistically undistinguished documentaries on Martin Luther King Jr. that I saw in public school. As a piece of art, Follow Me is pretty hackneyed stuff.
The obtrusive, public-domain-quality guitar music coats every scene of Yoni’s childhood in saccharine aural coat, and none of it helps propel the film’s sloth-like pacing. What does perk some interest are the intervallic cutaways to news footage of the four days of existential terror leading up to the raid on Entebbe. But spreading them out amid Yoni’s biography only makes the man’s life story (fighting in the Six Days’ War and Yom Kippur War, like most Israelis of his generation) look saggy and ordinary by comparison.
Follow Me seems to overtly sidestep any inflammatory political statements — not an easy accomplishment in a film whose climax is the Palestinian terrorist plot that martyred an Israeli hero. But the project still has a whiff of propaganda, the same whiff that permeated the pro-war dramas of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
If it were about an American military hero, it might end with a shirttail about where to enlist with the armed forces. It shows that even polite, middlebrow docs like this can have an agenda.
FOLLOW ME: THE YONI NETANYAHU STORY. Directors: Jonathan Gruber and Ari Daniel Pinchot; Distributor: International Film Circuit; Not rated. Opens Friday at Regal Shadowood 16, Living Room Theaters at FAU, Muvico Parisian 20, Cobb Downtown at the Gardens, Regal Delray 18, Movies of Delray, Cinema Paradiso and O Cinema.