USA, — In the first 10 minutes of “Between the Temples,” director Nathan Silver’s equally acerbic and tender soul-searcher, Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) gets into a bar fight, lies in the street while imploring a big rig driver to squash him and is interrogated over the pudginess of his face: “Do you cry a lot?”
And yet, Ben himself might bristle at the use of “fight,” “squash” or “interrogation,” if not because he’s hesitant to face the finer details of life a year after his wife’s death, then because feeling the brute force of mortal recognition isn’t as important to this middle-aged sad-sack as making sure others can feel his presence at all—that they can at least acknowledge an existence that, at movie’s start, is running dangerously low on willpower. Ben, after all, can’t seem to find his tune at the Jewish temple where he’s a cantor.
Enter Carla (Carol Kane, impeccably tuned to this movie’s off-kilter-ness), Ben’s old music teacher who is at once sensitive to his loneliness and also mired in some existential sleepwalking of her own. She thinks asking Ben to prepare her for a bat mitzvah will help, as if the coming-of-age ceremony typically reserved for young teenagers might bring some clarity. The conceit is amusing, played less as a stringent checklist of Jewish traditions than as the means through which Silver and co-screenwriter C. Mason Wells can explore an inverted teacher-student dynamic, portrayed through jarring extreme-close-up emphasizing the characters’ emotional immobility. But it’s the implications that infuse “Between the Temples” with a narrative confidence that makes it deft in dour moments, and uniquely uplifting in its obtuseness. Ben and Carla are both looking for a certain kind of fulfillment, sure, but things aren’t quite so simple here as one person moving forward, one person looking back and – voila! – it all suddenly makes sense. The movie’s terrain is the chaos of human spontaneity, and in treading it Silver and Wells eventually reveal the beauty that’s been around Ben and Carla all along.
The movie is one of confrontations. Our leads face off against themselves, against norms and expectations, against parents whose ideas of what’s best for them might say more about their own shortcomings. And if the movie is constructed of confrontations, then it’s about the rendezvous between identity and affirmation, and our desperate need for larger-than-life questions to retain the vitality we imagine for them once we think we've found the answers.
The film is also, more plainly, about the very strange connection that blooms between Ben and Carla, and either’s inability – or perhaps unwillingness – to take the reins in deciphering it. That’s a relatable characteristic, and perhaps the skeleton key to understanding when and why the storytelling starts to border on the shamelessly antic. On a scene-to-scene filmmaking basis, “Beyond The Temples” is a discordant, mighty nervous movie; often cinematographer Sean Price Williams suddenly fills the frame with Ben or Carla’s face as if his camera noticed something there and is anxious to make sure we didn’t imagine it. The frantic editing by John Magary yields collisions of dialogue and visual awareness, and the movie’s rhythms come to be our way of experiencing what’s going on in the mind of someone who often seems to apparate into situations he doesn’t want to be in and proceeds to make the absolute worst of them. It slots right in with Emma Seligman's "Shiva Baby" in a burgeoning canon of anxious movies about Jewish protagonists, while retaining its own humanity through generational contrasts.
As a most unusual kind of love triangle emerges in “Between the Temples,” so too does our confidence that those in Ben’s orbit – including Madeline Weinstein’s Gabby, the young acquaintance steadily pining after Ben, and a splendid Dolly De Leon’s Judith, his particularly involved mother – won’t be immune to his emotional veering. And Schwartzman, memorably melancholic in last year’s “Asteroid City,” keeps us off balance with Ben’s rolling boil of confusion that he tries so hard to mask (for his proxy, look no further than the family’s broken basement door, which literally screams its way to being one of the movie’s best bits).
This is all to say that “Between the Temples,” for how keenly attuned it is to its leads’ psychologies, purposefully can feel like it’s always second-guessing itself. It’s playfully knowing and appealingly awkward, but is it profound? I wonder. And I wonder whether or not Silver’s ultimate message is that profundity often manifests how we least expect it to.
"Between the Temples" is rated R for language and some sexual references. It's in San Antonio theaters now. Runtime: 1 hour, 51 minutes.
Starring Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Dolly De Leon, Caroline Aaron
Directed by Nathan Silver; written by Silver and C. Mason Wells
2024
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