In a sleepy town in upstate New York, Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman), the subject of writer-director Nathan Silver’s off-kilter Jewish comedy Between the Temples, isn’t doing very well. His wife, an alcoholic novelist, died a year earlier after slipping on an icy sidewalk. He’s a cantor at the local temple, bust lost his singing voice. Schlubby, unshaven, eyes downcast, Ben shuffles through life in a daze, disillusioned with his faith and disinterested in the overt romantic set-ups by his overbearing Jewish moms (Caroline Aaron and Dolly De Leon). “Even my name is in the past tense,” he laments, an incisive complaint-joke in a film full of them. At one point early in the film, co-written by C Mason Wells, Ben lays in front of a truck and asks it to keep going.
Not that Between the Temples is a slog, or even particularly dark. Captured in the nostalgic glow of cinematographer Sean Price Williams’s roving 16mm camera, Ben’s malaise is warm and inviting. Being alive is tough, funny, awkward and embarrassing business, and Silver is finely attuned toward life’s strange run-offs and unexpected connections. Between the Temples radiates a wry and compelling view on life, from its punny title to its offbeat, capital-C characters – particularly once Ben, drunk off too many mudslides (humiliating) and nursing a punched face, reconnects with his grade-school music teacher, Carla Kessler O’Connor (a delightful Carol Kane).
Ben remembers Mrs O’Connor as a loose and inspiring teacher; Carla doesn’t remember Ben at all. He’s drawn to her humor, curiosity and a zest for life that rivals people half her age; she’s won over by his nakedly wounded heart and tradition of faith. Both have lost their spouses. She always wanted a bat mitzvah, but as her parents were anti-religion Jewish communists and her husband was Catholic, she never went to temple. Soon, the long-ago tables are turned as Ben becomes her teacher for adult bat mitzvah lessons – much to the chagrin of Carla’s staunchly atheist adult son (Matthew Shear) and De Leon’s intimidating Judith, who wishes Ben would be more enthusiastic about her scheme to set him up with Rabbi Bruce’s (Robert Smigel) twentysomething daughter Gabby (Madeline Weinstein).
The bulk of the film sweetly renders Carla and Ben’s bond through Hebrew lessons, reflections on their past selves, non-kosher burgers and mushroom tea. Their chaste relationship – which no one, even the two involved, fully understands – believably walks a fine line between romance, friendship and mother-son; like many of the best unlikely pairings, their connection is an uneasily defined mix of feelings, timing and alchemy. Schwartzman and Kane keep up a tight rhythm of stumbling deferences and cascading reactions that power the film, with the latter an ethereal and genuinely funny counterweight to the type of neurotic, masculine self-loathing that’s defined much of Jewish comedy.
Schwartzman, playing in deadbeat contrast to his more mannered roles in Wes Anderson films, leans into the physical comedy of a man bearing the weight of grief and convincingly checked out on social graces – even the attention of the beautiful Gabby, a struggling actor looking for validation and baffled by his hapless disinterest. She can see there’s something odd in Ben and Carla’s bond – an unusual and affecting relationship around which to build a movie, particularly one composed of what feels more like sharp vignettes than the usual flow of plot. These oddball moments can feel gloriously strange, such as when a tripped-out Ben watches footage of his bar mitzvah and communes with his younger self or, in one of the film’s most affecting scenes, when Carla orders Ben to repeat back the story of why she never had a bat mitzvah as one of her music students with a lesson. Other times, as with most of Ben’s fragmented recollections of his wife (also played by Wiseman), the reality distortion can feel alienating. A couple of crucial confrontations – all over excruciatingly awkward meals, of course – are, likewise, a little too dialed-up, everyone doing their bit in a loop, to fully land.
Still, for all the characters’ misery and misfires, Between the Temples is a winsome journey. It’s a little weird, a little sweet and a lot of awkward – a testament not just to the Jewish tradition but the faith we can learn to have in each other.
