There is an honesty to Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples which belies the stylistic flourishes and alt-comedy sensibility. Moment after moment provides grist for some great epiphany or cute punchline that never quite comes. That is not to say it”s a comedy without laughs; “Can we have a shotgun bat mitzvah?” feels like a contender for one of the year’s best snort-funny lines. No film where a rabbi (TV Funhouse and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog creator Robert Smigel) putts golf balls into a shofar can be accused of taking itself too seriously.
Between the Temples‘ storyline about two people marching to their drummer and finding an unexpected connection does not use their quirkiness as some indie film badge of honor. Instead, Silver shows the isolation and self-doubt but also the surprising joy that can come from having such uncompromising personalities without a corresponding self-awareness.
Ben (Jason Schwartzman) is a near-catatonically depressed widower who makes every wrong choice in life and does not seem to be learning lessons from anything, like a person falling down an endless staircase. He is barely showing up for his job; though technically cantor for his small-town synagogue, he can hardly bring himself to choke out a few lines of a hymn before fleeing.
Despite the long procession of attractive young women that his overly attentive mothers (Dolly De Leon, Caroline Aaron) put in front of him, Ben fails to pick up on the signals. Instead, he indulges in an array of self-destructive behavior whose darkness is undercut but not erased by Between the Temples‘ comedic details (getting into a barfight after slamming mudslides, enacting history’s laziest suicide attempt by lying down in the road and pleading with a truck driver to drive over him).
His miasma of sadness is punctured by the appearance of Carla (Carol Kane). Once his grade school music teacher, she is now a delightfully batty retiree who wants to finally get the bat mitzvah that her Communist parents, now-dead Protestant husband, and militantly atheist son have stopped her from having. Over a half-century older than the kids in Ben’s classes and almost completely unschooled in Judaism, Carla convinces Ben to prepare a senior citizen for a ceremony meant to signal a girl’s coming of age.
This by itself would not be much to hang a film on. But Kane and Schwartzman make an indelible enough team that Between the Temples‘ story doesn’t even need to matter. Her slightly cracked manner, with the raspy voice and off-kilter delivery, provides the daffy counterweight to his deadpan moodiness and simmering anger. Silver could have made a decent enough film out of just Kane and Schwartzman goofing around in their oddball quest; the bafflement of Ben and Carla’s families at their suspiciously close bond provides plenty of awkward comedy. But the film builds out from its cute outsider story to become more about the prices people pay to find what makes them happy.
Between the brown-grained 16mm film stock, Ben’s antisocial distance, split screens, close-in zooms, and shot-specific nods to Mike Nichools’ The Graduate, Between the Temples aims to evoke a specific style of late-1960s and ‘70s stories about unconventional people unable to provide what society wants. Much like many films from that period, this story has a wooziness, with Ben’s jangled mood and people’s often inexplicable behavior (many characters are either overly concerned about him or hostile towards him), that suggests some of what is happening could be figments of his imagination.
What feels real, however, is Ben’s search for meaning. In one scene, he wanders into a Catholic church. “We don’t have heaven or hell,” he says in an impromptu theological conversation with a priest (Jason Grisell). “We just have upstate New York.” It’s a funny line on its own. It is also a clue to just how lost Ben is, having quite literally lost his voice to celebrate the faith he may no longer have.
Like many stories about people like Ben and Carla who refuse to do what they are told, Between the Temples is enamored with their individualism. But the film parts ways with more conventional misfit tales by not condescending to its characters with the belief that their oddities can be easily packaged and explained.