This screwball comedy overflowing with charm tackles grief through mutual understanding
A vocalist at a Jewish temple who is unable to sing in the wake of his wife’s death, Jason Schwartzman stars as Ben Gottlieb in “Between the Temples.”
In the midst of a faith crisis, he reconnects with his elementary school music teacher, Carla, played by Carol Kane. This unlikely pairing leads to the most unorthodox of friendships.
Theater 1 was full of what I assumed to be Columbia locals and Ragtag loyalists. The audience bantered with the projectionist and set a soft, cordial tone as the lights dimmed.
The camerawork in this film is odd. There’s frantic cutting, zooming in and out and skipping to entirely new scenes abruptly. The uneven, rigid lines and delivery are met with dialogue that walks on the line before it.
From the beginning, the audience is shown that this is a very different kind of movie, and the fact of it is shoved in our faces.
Around halfway through the film, after a character drinks a cup of tea, everything becomes almost supernatural.
I wrote in my notes: “Is this a shroom trip??!!”
And it was.
I found it charmingly original to include something so out of place — complete with distorted voices and sped up and slowed down clips — in the midst of this heartwarming film.
Director Nathan Silver doesn’t hesitate to insert a claustrophobically close-up shot, forehead-to-chin, in a scene where two characters are simply talking. Typically, a director would employ this strategy to convey tension or chaos. Perhaps it was attempting to show Ben’s anxious personality, but I saw it as solely experimental, surrealist camerawork. He even switches between handheld, documentary-esque filming to a classic, invisible style.
Ben resembles a protagonist in an Ottessa Moshfegh novel; unlikable, unreliable, isolating and self-destructive. I recall Charlotte’s line in Pride and Prejudice (2005): “I’m 27 years old. I’ve no money and no prospects. I’m already a burden to my parents. And I’m frightened.”
He cries to his Rabbi: “Ben! Even my name is in past tense!”
Yet Carla is the kind of woman you’d be delighted to be sat next to on a plane. Eclectically dressed, hair bigger than her personality, red-lipped, a Phoebe Buffay, aquarius type. Witnessing her spunky nature is enough to calm your anxieties of growing gray and getting older.
The two of them are wholly alone – one, a vibrant soul at peace in her solitude, the other, a middle-aged man in denial of his stability.
“Between the Temples” combines the tropes of “The Holdovers,” the characters of “Shiva Baby” and the way “Buffalo ‘66” has a foggy haze blanketed over the entire film. Filmed on 16mm, there is a grainy appearance throughout: 1970’s muted browns, beiges and oranges.
Written and directed by Silver, the screenplay’s humor is as dry as a day-old challah.
“In Judaism, we don’t have heaven or hell, we just have upstate New York,” Ben says to a Catholic Priest in his ongoing search to find spiritual assurance.
As the film progresses, you realize that the title is a double entendre — between the temples, as in a Jewish temple and Ben’s ongoing quarrels with his own faith. It also means between our minds – ‘temples,’ like the connections we make with the souls around us and the ways in which we love.
Like she once did as his teacher, Carla harbors ‘little Benny.’
“I could just jump into your heart and live in there if it’s okay with you,” Ben professes to Carla, showing the growth he has experienced throughout their friendship.
Schwartzman, again, like a Moshfegh protagonist, possesses the expertise to infuse an unlikable character such as Ben with depth and charm. Looking back at his filmography, this is a reoccuring theme in his acting. The narcissistic Max Fischer in “Rushmore” and the immature Louis XVI in “Marie Antoinette” are unbearable yet interestingly redeemable.
Carla, a self-proclaimed “red diaper baby” is the child of communist parents. She decides in her elderly age that she would like to finally have her bat mitzvah and wants ‘little Benny’ to be her teacher. Concurrently, she aids him in his inability to use his voice like she had so long ago. She does this by employing a strategy she used with the elementary schoolers she taught: belly breathing.
She lays Ben down on his back and affirms him, “You’ve got a big voice in there, I remember!”
Through music, teaching and mutual understanding, Carla and Ben heal each other’s open wounds.
As I left the theater, I heard an audience member say, “Well that was an odd one.” This was my consensus as well, though we seemed to enjoy it nonetheless. Only at Ragtag could you stumble into a micro-budget film like this, giving it a further magnetism being in a theater as treasured as that one.
“Between the Temples,” is an ‘odd one,’ but it’s an odd one with a lot of heart. It will leave you feeling warmer, with more love for the oddballs in your lives and craving challah.
Edited by Alyssa Royston | aroyston@themaneater.com
Copy edited by Emma Short and Hannah Taylor | htaylor@themaneater.com
Edited by Annie Goodykoontz | agoodykoontz@themaneater.com