Between the Temples

If “The Holdovers” was merely a facsimile of a 1970s movie, right down to emulating the photographic look of a movie from that decade, “Between the Temples” innately evokes the true spirit of a 1970s movie despite being set in the present. It is character-driven, and those characters tend toward endearing oddballs who all feel like real people rather than mere projections of writer/director Nathan Silver, and rather than calibrating its aesthetic for optimal audience love, it gives zero fucks, determined to tell its story on its own terms. Its May-December romance evokes Hal Ashby’s 70s staple “Harold and Maude,” but despite its own character’s not-entirely-serious suicidal tendencies, it feels closer in spirit to one of Elaine May’s 70s comedies, as the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis pinpointed, not least because of its also-innate Jewishness. Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) might be in his 40s but he’s divorced and living at home with his mom Meira (Caroline Aaron), and her wife Judith (Dolly De Leon), meaning he is living in his moms’ [emphasis added] basement; it’s a Marvelous Mrs. Maisel joke written to the screen rather than told.

Recently divorced, Ben is a cantor who has lost his voice, evoked in the opening scene where he struggles to sing the music at worship, fleeing the synagogue instead, lying down in traffic in a comically pitiful suicide attempt that fails, and then repairing to a bar where he gets drunk on mudslides and then into a fight that winds up with him sprawled on a barroom floor where his grade school music teacher, of all people, Carla Kessler (Carol Kane), appears, looking down on him like an eccentric angel. That’s just a description of some plot, but it also conveys the headlong narrative rush of “Between the Temples,” which despite its conventional arc is rendered to feel as it’s all coming together on the fly. That’s underscored in the camerawork, which isn’t passive, willing to get in there with its characters and mix it up, never more than when Ben unwittingly combines meat and dairy with a cheeseburger in rendered in uncomfortable close-ups that seem to evoke the danger and delight of going non-kosher. 

In addition to his recent divorce, Ben is suffering a crisis of faith, even going so far as to visit a Catholic church and chatting with a priest (Jason Grisell). This scene is at once completely earnest and a little absurd, fitting the tone of the whole movie in which Carla wants to have an adult bat mitzvah and wants Ben as her tutor. Having been raised in a communist household without faith, Carla is seeking to embrace one for the first time. And that pursuit is what helps to bring Ben back around to his own faith, re-embracing his more youthful self, a time when he truly believed, underlined in how he might just be falling in love with his pupil, an adult-aged role reversal that Silver’s script simultaneously acknowledges is odd, if not out-of-bounds, but also earnest. It is all at once wrapped up and blown apart at a Shabbat dinner where tension and confusion and cringe comedy come together where nobody seems to believe quite what’s happening.

That’s what the performances of Kane and Schwartzman evoke too, making strong use of her patented eccentricity and his comic incredulousness. It’s as if their characters are being swept along by a mystifying current, and in the electricity and excitement of it, they are willing to go for the ride and see what’s on the other side. Of course, you can be sure that if Ben has lost his singing voice, he will reclaim it, and even if that’s technically a spoiler, it’s not, not really. Silver scores much of the action to unlikely 60s and 70s Hebrew rock songs, embodying Ben’s inner-tempest, but also going to show the music was in his heart all along.