Most of the founding fathers of the Hollywood studios were Jewish, but very few of the movies they produced depicted Jewish American life. Since then, the most significant films that have done so have been independent productions, whether from decades ago (“The Plot Against Harry,” “Hester Street”) or more recently (“A Serious Man,” “Armageddon Time”). Now there’s a new entry in the field, “Between the Temples,” whose sardonically punning title, though suggesting something of the movie’s bitter comedy, barely hints at its bracing extremes of melancholy, derision, and tenderness. The film is the first high-profile project by Nathan Silver, who has been assiduously at work for the past fifteen years directing distinctive indie films on stressfully tiny budgets, often featuring his mother, Cindy Silver, a nonprofessional actress. His previous work has sometimes brought Jewish customs to the fore; “Soft in the Head” (2013) dramatized a pair of Shabbat dinners. In the new film, Silver, working with a bigger budget and a cast of notable actors—headed by Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, and Dolly De Leon—expands his emotional range and his scope of action while delving into secular Jewish life and its interface with organized religion. (The movie was shot in early 2023, before the October 7th attacks on Israel and the massacres in Gaza, thus turning it, in effect, into a historical drama of American Jewry.)
Schwartzman plays Benjamin Gottlieb, a forty-year-old cantor at a small synagogue in upstate New York. He has taken an extended sabbatical from his liturgical duties: his wife, Ruth, a novelist, died a year before, and grief has deprived him of the ability to sing. He lives with his “moms”—his actual mother, Meira (Catherine Aaron), an artist, and her wife, Judith (De Leon), a real-estate broker—in their basement. When Ben attempts a comeback at the pulpit and fails, he lies down in the middle of a road, hoping for a quick end. Instead, he is taken to a bar, where he has the novel experience of getting into a bar fight, after which his bruised cheek and bruised ego are tended to by another patron, Carla O’Connor (Kane), who is there doing karaoke. They discover that she was his music teacher in elementary school, and she soon drops in on his Hebrew-school class, declaring that she wants a bat mitzvah and insisting that he give her the requisite lessons.
Ben is skeptical—O’Connor doesn’t sound like a Jewish name—but she explains that she was born Carla Kessler to communist parents who raised her without religion. It emerges that she, too, is unmoored: she was pushed out of her teaching job after forty-two years but is unwilling to go gently, despite three mini-strokes, into a life of card games and book clubs. In a turn of events that is unsurprising but nonetheless unfolds in startling ways, the bat-mitzvah lessons give rise to a friendship defined by an unorthodox approach to religious practice.
While learning the liturgy, Carla helps Ben get his voice back, both literally and metaphorically. She has him do “belly breathing” exercises, which involve nonerotic but intimate physical contact. He invites himself to her home so that they can watch a VHS recording of his own bar mitzvah, from 1994. He soon becomes a regular (nonsexual) overnight guest there, borrowing pajamas belonging to her grown son, Nat (Matthew Shear), a psychiatrist who, upon seeing Ben in them, gets clinically weirded out. But “Between the Temples” isn’t “Harold and Maude.” Though a love story of sorts, it’s neither a tale of eccentrics finding each other nor a tale of absurdism appearing sane in a mad world. Rather, it’s a scathing vision of the routines of Jewish life, from its formalities and rules to its institutions and social habits—and a gentle look at those who find comfort in its verities. Schwartzman played a Jewish writer in an earlier independent film, Alex Ross Perry’s “Listen Up Philip,” from 2014, which I then considered the most Rothian film I’d ever seen. But “Between the Temples” matches it as an extension of the novelist’s legacy. Where Perry’s film reflects the mature, autofictional Philip Roth of the Zuckerman novels, Silver’s movie advances the satirical and critical sensibility of Roth’s early years, as in the collection “Goodbye, Columbus.”
Ben’s life is a punch line to a joke: he has two Jewish mothers, and, now that he’s single again, they’re setting him up with eligible Jewish women. The movie starts with Ben at home, enduring the noodgy company of Rachel Plotnick (Annie Hamilton), a cosmetic surgeon summoned by his moms. Before realizing that she’s “unattached,” he frets, “Do you think I need work done?” A few days later, outside the synagogue, he’s ambushed by another woman, Leah (Pauline Chalamet), who, unbeknownst to him, connected with him on JDate. (Judith set up a profile for him.) Ben’s moms aren’t alone in trying to play matchmaker. In his office, his boss, Rabbi Bruce Koenig (Robert Smigel), acknowledging Ben’s miseries, talks of his daughter, Gabby (Madeline Weinstein), who’s also been going through “a very rough time.”
It’s partly because of Roth’s pathbreaking boldness and his many successors in the Jewish American arts—and because of the more firmly established place of Jews in American society—that the critique in Silver’s film is essentially uncontroversial. It’s also because Silver is inclined to look lovingly even at characters whose behavior he lampoons, whether mining comedy from Ben’s kosher diet, from his fantasy of converting to Catholicism in order to win Ruth an afterlife, or from Judith’s fervent efforts at the synagogue to raise funds for a Holocaust Torah restoration. (At a bake sale, Judith, ever the saleswoman, awkwardly posits a traditional connection between the Holocaust and baking.) Still, religious laws and long-standing customs involve far more than comedy. Rigid adherence to them risks jeopardizing Carla’s bat mitzvah, which looms ever larger to her and Ben as a vital milestone.
“Between the Temples,” written by Silver and C. Mason Wells, is tightly plotted but feels ready to lurch into chaos at any moment; the screenplay blends refined whimsy with painful confession and uninhibited pugnacity. Just about every scene has an inspired twist, an off-kilter bit of action or dialogue, that transforms exurban tranquillity into a minefield of emotional shocks and stifled desires, seething disappointments and frantic struggles. The images, in turn, don’t merely depict the drama but become integral to it, thanks to the cinematography of Sean Price Williams, one of Silver’s frequent collaborators. Williams is among the most important artists in modern independent filmmaking. His handheld-camera work, which borrows from the methods of cinéma-vérité documentaries, turns the camera into a participant, a virtual character in the proceedings. Here, his roving, darting images are as confrontational and impassioned as the events that they capture.
In “Soft in the Head” and other films directed by Silver, like “Uncertain Terms” (2014) and “Stinking Heaven” (2015), he makes use of the forms and tones of melodrama, a genre that often skirts the edge of comic exaggeration. Silver takes advantage of that proximity to lend raucous humor to harrowing stories. One needn’t know that “Uncertain Terms,” set in a home for pregnant teen-agers, was inspired by Cindy Silver’s experience as a teen mother, or that her latter-day bat mitzvah provided the spark for “Between the Temples,” to sense that these films are personal. Silver treads well-worn paths in ways so original that he makes them his own. He experiences venerable cinematic forms from the inside, with an ingenuous spontaneity and an emotional responsiveness that dispel all irony and foreclose any archness. He makes classic-infused cinema without quotation.
On the other hand, Schwartzman and Kane, two of the most gifted and original actors of our time, are also walking quotations. Schwartzman carries the world of Wes Anderson with him, and his pain-streaked, impulsive interpretation of Ben suggests that the character’s regulating mechanism—an Andersonian mix of precision and control—has come undone. Usually compact and angular, Schwartzman, as Ben, is a bit schlubby, wearing baggy outfits of inexpressive neutrality. But as he’s forced to make his own rules, he also begins to find his own style. As for Kane, her Oscar-nominated performance in Joan Micklin Silver’s “Hester Street,” a 1975 drama set on the Lower East Side in the eighteen-nineties, in which she plays a newcomer from Eastern Europe, made her an icon of Jewish American history. Carla, in “Between the Temples,” is given a terse but powerful backstory, and Kane conveys the character’s historically infused idealism, fierce purpose, and caustic humor with tremulous vulnerability and life-rich lucidity. She and Schwartzman expand Silver’s intimate cinematic universe beyond its frames and map it onto the world at large. ♦
