Directed by Nathan Silver, the film is a deliberately unbalanced affair.Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Between the Temples
Directed by Nathan Silver
Written by Nathan Silver and C. Mason Wells
Starring Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane and Robert Smigel
Classification N/A; 111 minutes
Opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal theatres Aug. 23
Critic’s Pick
“Are you laughing or crying?” That question, posed from one character to another late in the new film Between the Temples, sums up the production’s jagged sensibilities neatly.
Directed by Nathan Silver, the movie is a deliberately unbalanced affair about confused souls trying and often failing to navigate the fine line between tragedy and comedy. But that quick bit of dialogue also conjures up a specific kind of nerve-rattling, nostalgic anxiety that likely courses through the audience Silver is most directly targeting: Jewish moviegoers who have gone through the sweetly awkward pain of being bar or bat mitzvahed. Oy, what a movie this is.
Yet you wouldn’t expect such genuine power from a straight-from-Sundance film whose logline screams indie-cinema quirk. Following an upstate New York cantor named Ben (Jason Schwartzman) who is facing an existential crisis after the accidental death of his wife, the story starts off cute before adding on a layer of c’mon-now-unbelievability when Ben reconnects with his old grade-school music teacher, Carla (Carol Kane). Turns out that the off-kilter woman in her sixties now wishes to be bat-mitzvahed – and the kind but depressed cantor is the only one who can teach the long-lapsed Jew some lessons on the Torah.
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Any promises of mid-tier narrative eccentricity are immediately erased, though, once Silver and his team of mumblecore-cinema stalwarts – editor John Magary, cinematographer Sean Price Williams, co-writer C. Mason Wells – deliver the film’s very first scene.
Using extreme close-up shots that are cut together using staccato bursts of jerky editing, we’re introduced to Ben as he’s being harangued by his mother Meira (Caroline Aaron, who can by this point in her career do this Jewish-mom-guilt shtick in her sleep) and her domineering wife Judith (Dolly de Leon). The issues the family are discussing might be familiar to any number of crazy-clan melodramas – essentially, Ben needs to get off his grieving butt and back out into the dating world – but the style in which they’re delivered is startling. Shooting on grainy 16 mm film, Williams captures Ben’s world as if it is he was making both an homage to well-worn, tactile 1970s New York cinema and a rebuke against contemporary low-budget American whimsy.
Although sometimes dizzying and disorienting, the visual language of Between the Temples is relentlessly alive, with the camera never considering-slash-allowing for the possibility that its audiences’ eyes might wander. Consider Silver’s throw-back aesthetic both a cure for contemporary boredom and a not-so-veiled threat against the temptation to become distracted by whatever is happening on your phone.
This sense of committed grit extends to the performances. Schwartzman, after delivering one of the most lived-in performances of his career in last year’s Asteroid City – playing another widower trying in vain to move on – wholeheartedly embraces Ben’s flirtation with moral and even spiritual disaster. It is a work of acting devoid of vanity, though laced with bitter, hilarious truths. Kane is just as good as Carla, though like her co-star Aaron, this feels like a role that was tailor-made for the actress to mirror her long career of similarly off-kilter women, so the ultimate effect is (unfairly or not) less astounding. The same goes for long-time Conan O’Brien and Adam Sandler collaborator Robert Smigel, here playing a perturbed rabbi.
The real breakthrough moment might actually belong to Madeline Weinstein, who arrives midway in the film as Gabby, the daughter of Smigel’s rabbi and a potential love interest for Ben. Her character seems either to be just recovering from or an inch away from developing a nervous breakdown – a high-voltage intensity that Weinstein grounds with confidence. The actress is also instrumental in staging one of the most disturbingly effective sex scenes in recent history, a sequence that marries guilt, death, Judaism and hot-and-bothered dirty talk in ways that would drive Philip Roth mad with jealousy. Mazel tov to her.