BETWEEN THE TEMPLES (Nathan Silver 2024)

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JASON SCHWARTZMAN AND CAROL KANE IN BETWEEN THE TEMPLES

NATHAN SILVER : BETWEEN THE TEMPLES (2024)

Adult Bat Mitzvah project leads to a special friendship

It's time for a funky Jewish comedy, or so thought the many producers of Between the Temples. It's essentially an offbeat two-hander featuring Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane. This is not just a Jewish film, it's a JEWISH film. It's offbeat in focusing on on a platonic flirtation between a middle aged man and his retired school music teacher. This could be thought risqué, perhaps. Perhaps not. Certainly inappropriate though. Ben (Schwartzman) is the cantor at a synagogue in Sedgwick, New York who is going through a mid-life crisis, which includes literally losing his voice and trying to get a 2-ton truck to run over him. He is reduced to living with his two moms, Meira Gottlieb (Caroline Aaron) and Filipina Jewish convert Judith Gotleib (Molly De Leon, the servant who takes over the ruling class people after the shipwreck in Triangle of Sadness, and she tries to take charge here, but with less success). Ben's wife has recently died in a fall. She was alcoholic. An alcoholic novelist.

This doesn't put Ben off the sauce. We see him in a bar more than once. He gets drunk and is rescued and driven home by Carla Kessler (Kane), after they have recognized they "knew" each other long ago when he was in her class. In following up on this encounter, Carla proposes that, while her parents were anti-religion Jewish communists and her husband was Catholic so she never went to temple, now that her husband has died, she would belatedly like to recognize her Jewishness by having him lead her thrugh her Bat Mitzvah. Her atheist adult son Nat (Matthew Shear) strenuously disapproves. And so it goes.

It's nearly half a century since Kane was unforgettable in Joan Micklin Silver's movie about "greenhorn" Jewish immigrants in the Lower East Side of long-ago New York, Hester Street.. It's half that since Schwartzman started a long, successful, ongoing association with Wes Anderson by playing the lead role in the director's debut Rushmore.

What actors do is take on different looks and personas. it's obvious to contrast the precise, highly choreographed ones Jason has taken on for Wes with the schlubby, falling apart guy he's doing for Nathan. It's also obvious to say Jason is letting go with a less stylized, more conventional role being more "himself," perhaps. It's only a few steps further, perhaps, to say that compared to Wes's precise cinematic machinery, Between the Temples is a sloppy mess. Despite a high Metacritic rating,* a few viewers have said that. They have been annoyed by the look of this film, its sudden jumpncuts and its jerky camera work and abrupt extreme closeups on the actors. I did find them annoying. Sean Price Williams' 16mm photography goes too far. Though in a key final scene it makes the tennis match of rapid conversation extraordinarily vivid, a lot of other times it's insufferable.

The Coen brothers' 2009 A Serious Man (also about an American Jew in a midlife crisis and with a Bar Mitzvah) has been mentioned in this context. But that is, well, a serious film, and also one of the Coens' best and also a very complex film that works on multiple levels at the same time. Silver's film, though it does have some surreal drug stuff, approaches Jewishness in a simpler, more direct, realistic way. It means to draw comedy out of tragic events, but it's softhearted about it. Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel), is a nice, forgiving man. The film is so forgiving, it arouses only a few chuckles, so carelessly it doesn't land its jokes every time, if they even are jokes. Group moments seem like scenes from the great HBO anthology series "High Maintenance" that have been allowed to run on too long. In the Ebert.com critic Brian Tallerico's Sundance review he says he thinks this escapes the cliches of the Sundance comedy: "it should be too cutesy, twee, or laden with life lessons" but it "avoids" "many of the traps." (In this short piece of a three-part festival review Tallerico doesn't take the time to explain how.)

A little over half way through the film, with a scene where Ben gets kicked out of Carla's family dinner at a fancy restaurant called The Chained Duck, things start to click. This is always a warm hearted comedy, and despite its clichés (Tellerico calls them "archetypes"), including an attempt to match Ben up with the rabbi's eager, young over-sexed daughter (Madeline Weinstein), there's a kind of gemütlich Jewish nuttiness blended with fucked-up rom-com that begins to work, and the lead actors are pros exploring new possibilities. Silver and his co-writer C. Mason Wells are really getting carried away when they include Ben getting a blow job from the rabbi's daughter after they've gotten turned on listening to his dead wife's dirty phone messages while parked at a cemetery. The concluding conceit, that the manipulative family members fail, is a familiar one, but it's crowned in the second, much longer, of two well orchestrated scenes of disastrous family dining, and the flow of dialogue is spot-on. The little one-on-one final scene outdoors in leafy backlit sunshine is romantic. Ben has found the crazy thing he has to get involved in to deal with his grief.

Between the Temples, 111 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 19, 2024; also shown at the Berlinale, LIsbon, Tribeca, Provincetown, Nantucket, Karlovy, Edinburgh, Montclair, San Francisco Jewish Film Festival US theatrical release by Sony Aug. 23, 2024, including at many Bay Area theaters.
*Metacritic rating: 82%.