At a moment of especially heightened anxiety occurring — when else? — during Shabbat dinner, one of Between the Temples’ wiser characters offers a parable about toothpaste, its tube, and the impossibility of getting the fated gel back inside once it’s been squeezed out. “Words can’t be taken back,” the parable suggests, even and especially when those words are “love.” The toothpaste story makes another dinner attendee — a rabbi fond of putting golf balls into shofars and poop jokes into temple fundraiser speeches — nod sagely. He says there’s a similar parable, about pillows and feathers. “There are always more words,” his suggestion suggests, almost accidentally.
Between the Temples, directed by Nathan Silver from a script co-written with C. Mason Wells, is the story of Ben (Jason Schwartzman), a cantor who has lost his faith and singing voice in the wake of his wife’s death. Drinking an infinity of mudslides to deaden the despair, he finds himself peeled off the floor after a particularly stupid bar brawl by Carla (Carol Kane), his former music teacher. She then enlists the former “Little Benny” as a teacher as she prepares for her own adult bat mitzvah. Crucially, the film suggests that Carla’s decision to become a bat mitzvah is as much a product of simply wanting to spend more time with Ben as it is out of yearning; just because it’s an improvised decision doesn’t mean it sends itself up.
The film sets to work a just-familiar-enough Seymour-Audrey romance in a Rhinebeck, New York, world of the gently surreal and the abruptly anxious, modes matched by Sean Price Williams’ clipping, close-proximity camera. The Shabbat dinner in question brings together Ben and Carla as well as his two mothers (Dolly de Leon and Caroline Aaron) and the poop-joke rabbi (Robert Smigel) and his family, which includes Gabby (Madeline Weinstein), his actor-daughter engaged in her own hard year. That the dinner finally bubbles over because Ben — truly, actually ebullient for the first time in the film’s two hours — suggests a game of telephone is unsurprising. Between the Temples is a film about finding the words. Whether committing to tongue and memory the Hebrew for a religious ceremony or finding the courage to say “I love you” from the midst of a truck-ton of grief, the narrative desires of the film’s characters mirror the film’s own writing. Working from a “scriptment” rather than explicit and traditional scripts, Silver and Wells invite a writerly approach from their actors that yields an environment not entirely unlike a Mike Leigh film. There are so many reasons to lay down in front of an eighteen wheeler. There’s also, sometimes surprisingly, always at least one reason not to.
It’s in the rendering of those reasons that Silver and his collaborators come up, in confrontation with a perhaps uncaring cosmos, with a welcomely sweet parable of their own. The film navigates a few different frames of familiarity and its 16mm cinematography shoots Madeline Sadowski’s grime-hazed DayGlo world into a kind of unremembered Hal Ashby treatment. Taken in constellation with Owen Kline’s Funny Pages (2022) and Williams’ own The Sweet East (2023), the film’s texture suggests a way of seeing novel protuberances in life — the death of a loved one, the collapse of an engagement, the creep-closer of mortality — not with the exacting harshness of HD, but the gummy body-ness of skin circulating in front of a light source before sifting into darkness. If the film doesn’t know what comes ahead — either for its characters or the future of this kind of simultaneously patient and silly adult filmmaking — it’s at least willing to stake itself on traditions and affections. Not unlike the imperfect faith of its leading figure, it stands for something.
Perhaps unlike Funny Pages and The Sweet East, and to its immense credit, Between the Temples rises above aesthetic devotion into the territory of cinema as a connective medium. It’s impossible to state the degree to which this transcendence is due to Carol Kane’s performance, a marvel of controlled vocal gymnastics and a certain scrutiny paid to her every scene partner. Carla — based in part on, and in an earlier conception played by, Silver’s mother, Cindy Silver — looks out from Between the Temples as a woman whose face holds all the regret and grief and memory that 70 years collects. Kane, a close friend of the late Gena Rowlands, creates a character in the same relentlessly human way Rowlands did, unwilling to give up desire, whether for making art (singing karaoke in a bar, or starring in a film, maybe) or for getting close to a peculiar human being peculiarly on the same wavelength, despite differences in age or lived experience. There is a warmth and spontaneity to Carla which innoculates Between the Temples from both flippant throwaway or masculine sadsackery. It’s a bit of a miracle, watching her.
On performance: is there any leading man working today whose star stuff is as evocative to spectators of a certain age than Schwartzman? After turning in career-best work in Asteroid City (2023), a meta-theatrical reminiscence as much about the working relationship between actors and directors as it was a mediation on a cousin strain of ennui confronted in Silver’s film, Between the Temples challenges Schwartzman — and the spectator — to accept a scrambled Benjamin Braddock, one confronting not the grand beginning of an end he can’t yet conceive, but the everyday indignity of believing in something in a world committed to alienating and separating us from our beliefs and each other. The Graduate (1967) forms a kind of belief system that Between the Temples holds in equal parts reverence and cheek, a set of words that Silver and his collaborators, in turn, parabalize. Silver’s film begins with a kind of reverse gear from Nichols’, as Cantor Ben runs panicked out of the temple, and further emergences of Nichols film — the older woman, the younger one, the sunglasses, the third-act breakneck run of “Go get her, Ben” — aren’t presented like Nichols or Hoffman or Bancroft presented them; Silver’s sensibilities are too developed to be reduced to the merely homaging. Instead, watching Ben and remembering Ben, seeing Jason or Carol and remembering Max Fischer or Gitl, one gets the sense that there are always more words because there are always other ways of telling a story. That we remember is the source of our greatest despair. Without that damned faculty, we wouldn’t find our way back to a song again. There at the end, a camera pans away from this story and lingers on a splotch of trees, looking again.
DIRECTOR: Nathan Silver; CAST: ddd; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: August 23; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 51 min.
