‘Between the Temples’ is a Mitzvah

After enduring a blatantly antisemitic museum exhibit last week, it was a relief to see Between The Temples, a proudly and affectionately Jewish film from director Nathan Silver. However, I don’t want to be like my late parents and just reflexively like any cultural product that contains Jewish characters or themes. Between the Temples is basically a July-November mumblecore romance that takes place partly in a shul. As Jewish content goes, it’s no ‘Shtisel’. But at least it honors its mother and father, so to speak, and doesn’t dismiss Jewish tradition outright. We’re still here, it’s saying, we’re still worth a conversation, and we’re still getting B’Nai Mitzvahs.

Our hero is Ben, a fortysomething cantor played with great Schwartzmanness by Jason Schwartzman. Ben has “lost his voice,” which is a cute conceit, except that the real problem is that he’s grieving his late wife, an alcoholic novelist who died in a stupid accident. This is a very New Yorker-subscriber problem that the movie doesn’t ever really make convincing, though Ben’s sadness is palpable. He lives in the basement of the house that his mother shares with her current lady-spouse, a Filipina convert to Judaism played by Dolly DeLeon, last seen messing people up in the Oscar-nominated Triangle of Sadness. The irony is that DeLeon’s character is way more of a yenta than Ben’s actual mother (Caroline Aaron), who seems to love him for who he is rather than who she wants him to be.

BETWEEN THE TEMPLES  ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Nathan Silver
Written by: Nathan Silver, C. Mason Wells
Starring: Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Dolly DeLeon, Robert Smigel, Caroline Aaron, Madeline Weinstein
Running time: 111 mins

The film’s possible Oscar nomination arrives in the form of the remarkable Carol Kane, who plays a character named “Carla Kessler,” a frustrated Laura Nyro who ended up being Ben’s middle-school music teacher. Carla is widowed herself, but is part Jewish, and she decides she wants to have a late-life Bat Mitzvah. Given that she’s Carol Kane, she is both batty and wise. Kane imbues Carla with a remarkable array of moving twitches and quirks. Her late-career performance echoes Ruth Gordon’s in Harold and Maude, a movie that Between The Temples more than partially resembles. Their meat and milk mingle, and love is in the air.

The problem with Between The Temples isn’t in the performances, which are excellent and include a funny turn from Robert Smigel, the voice of Triumph The Insult Comic Dog, as a golf-loving rabbi, ethically compromised in the most harmless ways possible, and a weird but plausible second-act appearance by Madeline Weinstein as Smigel’s messed-up daughter. But the movie is a stylistic mess. Director Silver seems to think he’s John Cassavettes reborn. His camera will not sit still, moving around the action twitchily, honing in on actor’s faces for endlessly annoying and pretentious closeups. Scenes meld together and timeframes become unclear, but then other conversations seem to go on forever. A visit from Carla’s adult son and his family happens out of nowhere and then lingers for way too many minutes, without satisfying resolution.

Between The Temples, in its heart of hearts, is an adult relationship comedy in the vein of  James L. Brooks or Nancy Meyers, but in Silver’s hands, it feels more like Uncut Gems without the potential for any crime melodrama. He resembles the Duplass Brothers way more than he does the Safdie Brothers. His film works best when someone puts on the clamps on him and stops him from moving the camera for a bit. It’s no accident that the best scene is the last scene, where the camera finally calms down and gives us our two protagonists in a long, still shot. They are themselves at last, and so are we.

This is the year’s most Jewish film in a year that desperately needs Jewish films. As Jewish films go, it’s no Annie Hall, Fiddler on the Roof, Yentl, Crossing Delancey, or The Twelve Chairs. But my parents and their yenta friends, who never met a Jewish movie they couldn’t watch, would have loved it. In times like these, that’s endorsement enough for me.