Director: Nathan Silver
Writers: Nathan Silver, C. Mason Wells
Stars: Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Dolly De Leon
Synopsis: A cantor in a crisis of faith finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher re-enters his life as his new adult Bat Mitzvah student.
Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) couldn’t have bumped into Carla Kessler (Carol Kane) at a better time. Lying on his back on what was undoubtedly a slush-covered barroom floor, having just received a sucker punch to the eye from a rude fellow bar-dweller who didn’t appreciate Ben’s penchant for Mudslides and/or uninvited confrontation, she might as well have been sent from above. Sure, it could have just appeared that way due to his vantage point, but Carla’s coming to the rescue opened an unforeseen door for Ben. A cantor at the nearby Temple Sinai, he’d recently lost his ability to sing thanks to an undefined incident that sounds an awful lot like a nervous breakdown in the wake of his late wife’s untimely death. (She was drunk and slipped on the sidewalk, cracking her head open and bled to death; gruesome, yes, but the way Ben describes it later in the film makes it sound as though it carried all the emotional heft of one dropping a watermelon at the supermarket.) In one fell swoop, Carla extends her hand and pulls Ben ever so slightly out of his rut. What a difference a day – or an unexpected encounter – makes.
Carla just so happens to be Ben’s old music teacher; she’s now retired and seems to spend a fair amount of time frequenting said bar’s karaoke nights, where she belts to an empty back room. In addition to his cantor duties, Ben teaches the temple’s bar and bat mitzvah class – “That is very modern,” Carla says when she comes to the synagogue one afternoon in hopes that she might be able to join the class. You see, she never had a bat mitzvah when she was a girl, and she wants to fulfill that dream now, despite being 70. After refusing initially, Ben warms up to the idea and agrees to teach Carla en route to her very belated yet much-deserved Jewish rite of passage. In turn, she helps de-ice Ben’s cold, closed-off heart with her natural warmth, as the two form an unlikely, mutually-beneficial friendship that carries Nathan Silver’s whip-smart, quip-heavy Between the Temples on its back with ease.
That’s not to say that Silver’s starriest film to date – the filmmaker, who is one of independent cinema’s most prolific workers, has made a number of small features over the course of his 15-year career – doesn’t have plenty of other elements that help make it one of the year’s most delightful releases. There’s John Magary, Silver’s regular editor, whose work here feels like the Energizer Bunny got control of Final Cut Pro and turned in a choppy, sprightly masterclass. Behind the camera sits Sean Price Williams, who shot the film on 16mm and was so clearly the cinematographer here that I clocked his involvement even before the credits rolled. And, of course, there’s the rest of its cast, an ensemble chock-full of pitch-perfect character actors like Caroline Aaron and Robert Smigel, not to mention Dolly De Leon, who plays one of Ben’s moms (Aaron plays the other).
Still, it’s the partnership of Schwartzman and Kane that really allows the film to flourish. Both actors have enjoyed accomplished careers, though it’s almost a stroke of genius to pair one actor who is currently enjoying a sustained heater with another whose best roles looked to have been behind them. Schwartzman – who appeared prominently in Asteroid City, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes in 2023, and has parts in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, and Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, all of which release later this year – is having something of a renaissance as a performer, as if it took 20 years for directors not named Wes Anderson to recognize his chameleonic range and startlingly-powerful screen presence, both of which manifest here into what is undoubtedly one of Schwartzman’s best performances to date. Kane, meanwhile, is better known for her parts in films like Dog Day Afternoon, Annie Hall, When a Stranger Calls, and The Princess Bride, but her turn as Carla seems as though it could inspire a self-revival of its own, a la Ke Huy Quan, perhaps. Of course, Between the Temples is hardly of a similar scale as Everything Everywhere All At Once, but casting directors would be smart to cash in on Kane’s vibrant work here.
And that duo’s chemistry is a must, given that Between the Temples might otherwise feel a bit grating in its comedy and style, both of which never let up. There’s something to be said for a film that commits so hard to its visual uniqueness that it becomes definitive for the crew behind its making; the same could be said for Price Williams’ 2023 directorial effort The Sweet East, which he also shot. But whereas that film’s story felt like a narrative representation of its camerawork – choppy and chaotic without a semblance of the necessary order that films need to feel intentional – Between the Temples manages to use technique to amplify its charm.
Shot entirely in Kingston, New York, a town of roughly 24,000 people, the film feels as intimate as the bonds it portrays. Following the death of his wife, Ben lives with his mothers, who are important donors to the church. Rabbi Bruce (Smigel) is a regular at the Gottlieb’s for dinner, and when his daughter Gabby (Madeline Weinstein) comes to town, it’s a foregone conclusion to everyone but Ben that they’ll get together. In the words of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, “The nice thing about living in a small town is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else does.”
This is Silver’s calling card. It has been since his 2009 debut The Blind – a little-seen New England-set drama about a frustrated married couple – all the way up to Between the Temples, the kind of effort that will undoubtedly afford him a bigger scale should audiences continue to turn up to see it. (The film crossed $1 million domestically after having spent just over a week in theaters; it can’t have cost more than a few hundred-thousand dollars to make.) But it would serve as a reasonable shock if Silver suddenly set his sights on something massive, other than continuing to cast bigger names in his films, with Schwartzman, Kane, and De Leon now serving as benchmarks.
The beauty of Between the Temples is twofold: In how it positions recognizable faces in a small dramedy about coming together to find happiness when such an emotion was thought to have been left behind long ago, and in its gloriously-witty way of telling a story that all of us – devoutly-Jewish or not – can understand, and perhaps have even lived out in our own way. Who among us hasn’t laid down in the middle of the road and begged for a garbage truck to run us over in a fit of self-deprecation? Silver successfully argues that such a desire is fine, as long as you eventually get up and ask the driver for a ride so that you can keep living your life. Lord knows what might await you just around the corner.
