Between the Temples (2024) Sundance Review — Carol Kane Shines in Faith Crisis Dramedy
From the opening blast of the shofar, Nathan Silver’s latest film Between the Temples places us in an upstate New York community where Jewish identity is central. Jason Schwartzman plays a schlubby, unshaven cantor and b’nai mitzvah instructor named Ben who is recently returned from sabbatical. He’s off to a rough start, however — his singing ability is impaired when a Triscuit cracker becomes lodged in his throat. Realizing in front of the temple congregants that his voice is gone, he darts out of the synagogue, runs into the street, and lies down in front of an oncoming semi. He lives, thank Adonai, but doesn’t seem too happy about it, yelling at the driver to please run him over.
Like Schwartzman’s character in last year’s Asteroid City, Ben has just lost his wife and is slowly working to piece himself back together. His two mothers, played by Dolly de Leon and Caroline Aaron, are desperate to set him up with someone. He’s sleeping on a pullout couch in their basement, the door to which never quite shuts properly. In one of the film’s best gags, it repeatedly swings open on hinges that sound possessed by a thousand screaming goats. While Ben may be deeply in grief, his attempts to isolate himself are comically disrupted at virtually every turn.
Nowhere is this more true than his relationship with Carla, played by Carol Kane. He reconnects with her one evening at the local pub, downing mudslide cocktails after the whole singing incident. While neither recognizes the other at first, they soon realize that Carla was Ben’s grade school music teacher, back when he was just “little Benny.” Her husband is also passed, and she’s recently suffered three minor strokes, giving her a sort of off-kilter energy that Kane inhabits perfectly. In fact, the film may not completely work without her performance, which conveys both an affable, gregarious quality and a deep tenderness toward Ben.
After drunkenly helping him home from the pub, Carla insistently inserts herself into Ben’s life, showing up to his b’nai mitzvah class despite being well past the usual age of thirteen. She reminds him of the breathwork exercises she led in music class, helping him to slowly find his voice again. But their relationship — is it friendly or romantic? — is not fully welcomed by everyone. Carla’s atheist son makes a surprise visit home to find Ben sleeping in his childhood bedroom and wearing his pajamas, teaching his mother Hebrew for her Torah portion. This creates for a hilarious and uncomfortable tension, as people around Ben begin to question his often clumsy life choices.
Such scrutiny feels ironic given the number of non-traditional relationships in his orbit. His parents are lesbians. The rabbi’s spouse — in contrast to the stereotypical image of a modest cleric’s wife — has massively augmented lips and cheekbones. And everyone seems to be hoping he’ll spark something with the rabbi’s college-aged daughter (Schwartzman’s real-life age is 43). Yet everyone seems scandalized that he might be interested in an older woman, insinuating — or outright claiming — that she somehow groomed him despite losing contact for over thirty years. It’s hard not to feel for Ben as he haplessly navigates between a need for connection and the social expectations placed on him, even from those who should understand most.
These expectations culminate in a remarkably tense dinner scene in the film’s second half. Here Silver draws from his mumblecore bonafides, a genre characterized by highly naturalistic, often improvised dialogue. Voices overlap and crescendo with dialogue that gives Uncut Gems a run for its money. Silver’s script shines strongest in this regard, allowing Schwartzman to deliver lines like, “Sometimes I feel like I’m going through the emotions — er, motions,” and, “Ben… even my last name is in the past tense.” Combined with a grainy film aesthetic that lends a fuzziness to match Ben’s vulnerability, Silver imbues his narrative with a warmth that can be felt even in upstate winter.
Despite everything, Ben and Carla’s relationship resists easy definition (although certain to ignite the age-gap discourse relitigated online every few months). Of course, Hollywood has nothing on the Jewish tradition, which is filled with stories of its patriarchs committing relational taboos — the father of the Israelites married his own half-sister, for goodness sake. Moses’s father married his own aunt! Such relationships would later be legislated against in Jewish law, lending an air of “do as I say, not as I do” to the whole affair. But for all the messy signals Ben receives from his community, he follows his longing for wholeness to its illogical conclusion, allowing for love and friendship to trump perfection. As he says: “In Judaism we don’t have heaven or hell, we just have upstate New York.” His pursuit may not be perfectly this or that, but maybe the pursuit itself is enough.
