Between The Temples' odd-couple screwball turns the screws

A prolific presence on the 2010s ultra-low-budget indie scene, Nathan Silver has always had a fascination with communal relations, delusions, and make-believe—themes that get a rewarding, sympathetic arrangement in the offbeat comedy Between The Temples, his first feature in six years and most accessible work to date. Jason Schwartzman stars as Ben Gottlieb, a cantor at a liberal synagogue somewhere in upstate New York who has lost his singing voice. The problem is clearly psychological: It’s been a year since Ben’s wife, an acclaimed writer, died in a freak accident, and he is deep in that contradiction that defines depression. 

Life in both the present and future tense appears meaningless, while every annoyance and indignity takes on extra symbolic meaning, begging to be read either as a metaphor for one’s condition or as confirmation of said condition’s irreversibility. Ben’s two moms, Meira (Caroline Aaron) and Judith (Dolly de Leon), keep setting him up on dates without his permission; the rabbi (Robert Smigel of Saturday Night Live and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog fame) is too busy practicing his golf game to offer consolation or advice; the door to the basement where he’s sleeping keeps creaking open on its own. 

At a local bar, after downing one too many Kahlua Mudslides and taking a punch to the face from a stranger, Ben meets seventy-ish widow Carla (Carol Kane), who he eventually recognizes as his old elementary-school music teacher Mrs. O’Connor. She gives him a ride home. The next day, she unexpectedly shows up at a Torah class he teaches for bored tweens, insisting that Ben help her prepare for a very belated bat mitzvah. (She never got to have hers because, as she explains, it was the 1960s and her parents were communists.) Ben sees the whole situation as ridiculous, but Carla won’t take no for an answer. 

Gradually, scene by scene, their relationship grows closer and stranger. They (accidentally) trip on mushroom tea together while watching a VHS tape of Ben’s bar mitzvah; he takes to sleeping in her son’s old childhood bedroom. The whimsy brings to mind other movies about intergenerational odd couples (Harold And Maude being the most obvious reference point), but Between The Temples’ real interest is in the confusing roles we can play in each other’s lives—as surrogates, stand-ins, or do-overs—and the meanings we fumble for in their performance, filtered through the familiar, well-worn subjects of loss, mid-life crisis, and Jewish identity. The script (co-written by Silver and C. Mason Wells) could probably be diagrammed as a complicated web of dichotomies (teacher/student, parent/child, etc.), specters, role-reversals, doublings, and rhymes. (There are, for instance, two different painfully awkward dinner scenes—one with Carla’s family, the other with Ben’s.)

Which is to say that if it wasn’t so frequently laugh-out-loud funny, Between The Temples might pass for a psychological drama, probing queasier territory once the rabbi’s daughter, Gabby (Madeline Weinstein), enters the mix as a potential romantic match for Ben. Nonetheless, the humor—sometimes acerbic, sometimes wacky—is integral to its worldview and exaggerated, stubborn characters. Though it eschews the ironic distance and meta genre-bending of some of his previous films (including the likes of Thirst Street, The Great Pretender, and Actor Martinez), Silver’s style remains nonconformist, mixing ominous, space-compressing 1970s-esque zooms and unexpected dolly moves with visual gags, overcranked footage, split-diopter shots, dream imagery, and iris-ins, all handsomely lensed in Super 16mm by the always creative and resourceful cinematographer Sean Price Williams. 

Underneath the prickly screwball banter, the jokes, the movie-isms, the occasional zaniness are probing questions about how we define ourselves and whether a community of faith can still represent something more important than gossip and an annual Holocaust remembrance bake sale. A lesser film might fizzle to a conclusion about how everyone’s a little screwed-up and that’s alright, but Between The Temples is earnestly looking for the positive. A ceremony, however pointless or absurd, still means something if it makes two people feel less crazy and alone.

Director: Nathan Silver

Writer: Nathan Silver, C. Mason Wells

Starring: Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Dolly De Leon, Caroline Aaron, Robert Smigel, Madeline Weinstein

Release Date: August 23, 2024