Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane Give Each Other What They Need Between the Temples

“A widower and his old music teacher prepare for a late-in-life bat mitzvah.” It sounds like the set-up for a joke. A bartender in Between the Temples deadpans as much, undercutting the hilarious, vigorous, emotionally rich movie with exactly the right amount of wry self-awareness. Filmmaker Nathan Silver re-teams with his Thirst Street co-writer C. Mason Wells (not to mention cinematographer Sean Price Williams and editor John Magary; this thing is an indie talent smorgasbord) for an endlessly energetic and exquisitely Jewish look at two lost souls’ desperate search for something to hold onto.

Ben (Jason Schwartzman) isn’t looking for love, or even purpose, really. He just needs to get through the day without lying down in the street and motioning for passing trucks to treat him like a speed bump. Carla (Carol Kane) isn’t here to help him, but to climb out of her own rut. The sad cantor who’s lost his voice, pounding mudslides at a dive bar, seemed as good a ramp as any. Their spark, never cloying and always quippy, matches all the heat radiating out from Between the Temples‘ grainy ’70s aesthetic and into its snowy setting. 

Ben, synagogue employee as he is, naturally seeks solace at a church of all places, where he comments to a priest that Jews don’t have heaven or hell, but upstate New York. In this desolate tundra—where Ben’s late wife cracked her head open on an frozen sidewalk a year prior—exists the pulsing, gossiping, meddling organism that is a temple’s community. Ben’s overbearing mothers (Caroline Aaron and Dolly De Leon, the latter especially funny) care for him in their way, as does his dry rabbi boss (Robert Smigel). But their warmth, which comes packaged as set-up dates with doctors and professional reassurances, can’t penetrate the ice around Ben’s heart.

It’s Carla, earnest and persistent and filled with needs that don’t actually have anything to do with Ben, that slaps him out of cryostasis. And in Ben, the 70-year-old finds someone who’ll take her seriously, unlike her similarly-aged son (Matthew Shear) who babies her much like Ben’s moms. The pair zip through Silver and Wells’ quick and clever script, enhanced by plenty of improvisation, where each line has a punchline and each punchline is elegantly hidden amidst the confident patter of its players. We get puns, we get groaners, we get prop gags, we get classic stereotypes, all dipped deep enough in a pool of sadness to mellow the feast of strong flavors. This wordy relentlessness doesn’t let up, paced with heady verve and matched by a camera that never quits reaching into its bag of invigorating tricks.

Between the Temples looks fantastic, and it never stops looking fantastic in new ways, with fun flourishes of style juicing up every 16mm sequence: We zero in on these two lives through iris shots and reflections, slow down with them in endless close-ups, tear around alongside them like Benny Hill, get more in their heads with intense zooms, jump cuts, split diopters and split screens—Between the Temples has it all. This is coupled with colors that fizz off the screen, as if you’re getting the last glimpse of them before they finally flicker out and we’re left stuck in black-and-white. It’s never cosplaying as cinema from another era, but using similar stylistic touchstones to make something both modern and specifically dislodged from time. Smartphones and the internet play at the edges of the story, but only enough to grant the confrontations between people a little extra technological tension.

And all this flash piles up underneath the two engrossing central performances, building a light-hearted foundation from which yearning can naturally blossom. Schwartzman’s fantastic sad-sack barely shuffles from place to place, his vitality seemingly stuck on old VHS tapes and portraits painted by his mother, like a reverse Dorian Gray. He’s never at ease: He’s always got a cold in his voice, or a Triscuit stuck in his throat, or his mom’s ill-fitting pantsuit hanging haphazardly off his limbs. Finding a willing student in Carla is far more fulfilling than connecting with the horny singles on JDate or the rabbi’s daughter (Madeline Weinstein, scene-stealing) play-acting his dead wife, in part because there’s a total lack of outside pressure. For once, this is something he can actually do, and as Schwartzman visibly relaxes—and even reverts, in some ways, to a more carefree youth—we realize how masterfully he’s embodied his middle-aged anxiety. Kane’s unpredictably bubbly energy, equal parts theatrical and maternal, doesn’t coddle but demands. The difference between the demands that drain and the demands that fulfill is delicate, but certain. 

As Ben teaches Carla for her upcoming coming-of-age, we’re swept away by their connection, convincingly sung from the bimah. They forge something genuine, sweet and, above all, intimate. A mutually restorative relationship of purpose—learning, teaching, finding joy in music and in novelty of experience—drives back the depression that was, only a few minutes ago, lying down in the middle of the road and picking fights with barflies. 

This back-and-forth is gently contained in a single scene of repetition: Carla asks Ben to echo back an anecdote she’s shared, not just proving that he was listening, but slipping on her life for a moment as he walks himself through her memories. It’s a bit like an acting exercise, and a bit like the act of teaching music—getting the notes right is important, but so is the rhythm, the pronunciation, the feel. It’s a personal process, representative of their bond.

Is it healthy? Is it sustainable? Will Ben, screw-up as he is, naturally allow himself to overstep? These are questions for later, silently asked by the character history and culture that Between the Temples so easily floods its frame with. The climactic Shabbat dinner, dragged out to an excruciating cacophony, touches too much on the answers for my taste, especially since its contained chaos was already so artfully spread across the dramedy leading up to it. But as a skin-peeling confrontation in a movie constantly stealing giggles from our tense chests, it’s a perfectly excruciating capper.

A recurring frustration in Between the Temples’ movie full of recurring frustrations is a door that won’t stay shut in Ben’s moms’ (apparently brand new) house. He slams it, it creaks open. He closes it gently and—wait a beat—there it goes again. When I first moved to Chicago, leaving the south for big city livin’, the bathroom door of my terrible studio apartment wouldn’t shut. Hell, it didn’t even close. It was too big to fit the doorframe. The place was terribly ventilated, so the door had swollen from years of broke jerks like me taking desperate showers. You can imagine that a tiny studio whose bathroom door is held (semi-)closed by a literal shoestring isn’t the most appealing place to live, let alone bring a date back to. It was a constant wound, opening and failing to close. Between the Temples is covered in these sores, full of stories that are funny from the outside and will be funny when told with hindsight. And it is funny. But it’s the honesty, our understanding of the how and the why behind these truthfully conveyed pains, that lodges Silver’s film in your heart.

Director: Nathan Silver
Writer: Nathan Silver, C. Mason Wells
Starring: Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Dolly De Leon, Caroline Aaron, Robert Smigel, Madeline Weinstein
Release Date: January 19, 2024 (Sundance)

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

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