THE STORY – A cantor in a crisis of faith finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher reenters his life as his new adult bat mitzvah student.
THE CAST – Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Caroline Aaron, Robert Smigel, Madeline Weinstein, Matthew Shear & Dolly de Leon
THE TEAM – Nathan Silver (Director/Writer) & C. Mason Wells (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 111 Minutes
Cantor Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) has lost his voice. Since his wife passed, he has been unable to sing. Also, he has been living with his doting mother (Caroline Aaron) and her partner (Dolly de Leon), the latter of whom is desperately trying to push him off on any age-appropriate Jewish girl in sight. You can’t blame him when he runs out on his first Friday night Shabbat service back from sabbatical after still being able to sing. At a bar, he runs into Carla O’Connor (Carol Kane), his music teacher from grade school. Impressed that he sings for a living and stuck in a rut of her own, Carla seeks Ben out at his synagogue and asks to be part of his Bar/Bat Mitzvah class; she was born to Communist Jewish parents who wouldn’t allow her to have one, and her late husband was an Atheist who wouldn’t hear of it. Ben can’t think of a good enough reason to say no, so he begins teaching her. While getting to know each other during their lessons, Carla and Ben connect as adults in a way that surprises them both, awakening a lust for life that long lay dormant in their lives. Will that lust for life turn into lust for each other?
If nothing else, Nathan Silver’s “Between the Temples” brings an authentic representation of Judaism to the screen. The joy and trauma expressed in this film have an unmistakably Jewish bent to them, as instantly recognizable to any member of the tribe as the rhythms of the film’s Altman-esque overlapping dialogue. The philosophical views of the characters have a deep basis in Jewish teachings, and the lived-in performances and setting keep everything grounded in small-town Americana that non-Jews can recognize, even when the finer points of the Jewish point of view may go over their heads. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of a Bar (or Bat) Mitzvah, the characters explain it in both strict Jewish terms (as a coming-of-age ceremony where a young adult first leads the congregation in prayer) and in personal terms as Carla talks about what it means to her. Carla, long out of touch with her Jewish heritage, isn’t familiar with a that many traditions, which leads to multiple misunderstandings and negotiations with Ben (especially in a hilarious scene at a restaurant where Ben has to explain what “eating Kosher” is after learning that the burger he’s eating has cheese cooked inside it).
These sitcom-like misunderstandings – paired with the natural-feeling dialogue – often lead to big laughs, but Silver surrounds them with superfluous stylistic flourishes. Smash zooms, herky-jerky camera movement, extreme close-ups, whip pans, insert shots… Silver and his team throw everything they can at the wall to see what sticks. The problem is that all that style ends up distracting from the dialogue and characters, leaving the impression of a director with a lack of confidence in his screenplay. This is strange, though, since Silver himself co-wrote the screenplay with C. Mason Wells. The nominal defense for the overabundance of style is that Silver is trying to evoke the style of films from the ‘60s and ‘70s, evidenced by the film’s grain and color grading, as well as the soundtrack choices. While all of these elements contribute to the film’s ‘70s feel, the combined effect of all of them together in such close proximity to each other is overstimulating in the extreme, ultimately alienating viewers by pushing them away from the characters, instead of pulling them in.
Thankfully, the cast is up to the task of carrying the film. Each performer here has been cast perfectly, and when the characters’ big personalities combine, the result is full of actorly fireworks. The film’s epically awkward climactic dinner scene is a corker, a chaotic clash of personalities that never feels scripted, thanks to the perfectly pitched performances. At the film’s center, Schwartzman and Kane are a match made in quirky heaven. The actors equal each other’s freaks so well that the will-they-won’t-they quality of their relationship never feels off-putting ,despite the wide age gap and the former student-teacher relationship. That’s much harder to do than it looks, but the veteran performers know this milieu and are on the same tonal wavelength, allowing their natural quirkiness to come across as just that: natural. If only the crew behind the camera had the same instinct, then “Between The Temples” wouldn’t be so headache-inducing to watch.
