Nathan Silver\u2019s \u201cBetween the Temples\u201d opens with a loud, keening blast from the shofar. If you haven\u2019t heard it before, imagine the sound of someone slumped forward in the driver\u2019s seat, face pressed against the steering wheel, and you\u2019ll be in the ballpark. It\u2019s a perfectly bracing note to open this year\u2019s most anxious comedy, about a cantor in a crisis of faith who has recently lost his wife, his voice, and his will to live.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Antic, endearing, and often achingly funny, the film stars Jason Schwartzman as Ben Gottlieb, who hasn\u2019t felt at home in his sleepy upstate New York community since the death of his novelist wife in an accident months earlier\u2014literally, given that he\u2019s moved back in with his overbearing mothers (Caroline Aaron and Dolly De Leon), whose well-meaning if clueless efforts to get him back in the dating game haven\u2019t exactly lifted his spirits. (\u201cIn Judaism, we don\u2019t have heaven or hell,\u201d Ben cracks with a small smile. \u201cWe just have upstate New York.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n
Unable to get the words out when asked to sing at his first Shabbat back at the pulpit, Ben flees the synagogue still wearing his tallit and walks home in the dark, replaying his wife\u2019s dirty voice messages until he abruptly has had enough and lies down in the road. An 18-wheeler rounds the bend but stops just short. \u201cKeep going,\u201d he begs. \u201cKeep going, please!\u201d Humiliating and profound, this punchline isn\u2019t quite introductory\u2014indeed, it\u2019s hard to think of another comedy that starts so strikingly in the moment as this one\u2014but it evokes the dynamic, dizzying swirl of pain and pleasure that, as devised by Silver and co-writer C. Mason Wells, constitutes the film\u2019s comic locus.<\/p>\n
Naturally, the driver can\u2019t grant Ben\u2019s request, but he does drop him off at a dive bar, where he throws back mudslides, gets punched out, and at this lowest of lows encounters his grade-school music teacher, Carla Kessler (Carol Kane), herself a widow in search of her next chapter. Though his mothers make no secret of their eagerness to set him up with a nice Jewish girl\u2014perhaps Gabby (Madeleine Weinstein), the daughter of their local rabbi (Robert Smigel)\u2014Ben finds himself spending more time with Carla instead. In hopes of reconnecting with their Jewish roots, Carla has decided she wants to finally have the bat mitzvah denied to her all those years ago by her Russian Communist parents and that she left behind when she married her now-deceased Protestant husband\u2014and she wants Ben to give it to her. He\u2019s caught off guard when Carla suddenly appears at the synagogue and signs herself up for lessons, given how much older she is than his typical students, but she only has to twist his arm so far before Ben gives in.<\/p>\n
After all, they\u2019re kindred spirits, in ways immediately obvious and less so; both have lost their spouses, but Ben and Carla are drawn to each other for more reasons than their mourning. Ben remembers \u201cMrs. O\u2019Connor\u201d as a warm and encouraging teacher, though the cantor\u2019s even more taken with her candor\u2014she doesn\u2019t remember him at all, she says\u2014and garrulous demeanor, not to mention the freedom he senses in her selectiveness with following only the religious customs that suit her. Carla, meanwhile, admires Ben\u2019s sensitivity to faith and that he listens when she speaks to him. Both have been kicked around by life and sense in each other a tendency to keep laughing through the pain\u2014even if, before this point, only miserably and to themselves. Perhaps the unexpected ease of their friendship makes it so undeniable. Bonding over Hebrew lessons, non-kosher burgers, and mushroom tea, these two improbably help each other out.<\/p>\n
This is Silver\u2019s ninth feature and, like his previous ones, it revels in capturing the alchemical, off-kilter chaos of oddballs in proximity; what makes it special has as much to do with the strange, spontaneous energies that fill the air between his characters as what it is they\u2019re saying. \u201cBetween the Temples\u201d could be broadly described as a behavioral comedy; it\u2019s not a critique of organized religion but an empathetic study of how people constantly organize and reorganize their relationships to religion\u2014and within that, their relationships to themselves and one another, in response to constantly fluctuating cross-currents of need, desire, and circumstance.<\/p>\n
To that end, Schwartzman and Kane make for a winning screen duo, their chemistry alternately jagged and tender as Ben and Carla settle into a kind of shared neurosis\u2014not a discovery nor a delusion, but something in between\u2014that neither can quite define or really cares to. Schwartzman, so affecting in last year\u2019s \u201cAsteroid City\u201d as another widower stopped by sorrow, plays Ben as a more slack, disorderly sad-sack whose grief has blotted out his sense of self. That\u2019s until Kane, with her zany comic stylings and that unmistakable voice, enters the frame with the irrepressible zest of a rising sun, clearing his clouds away; with her curiosity, ebullience, and raucous humor, Kane is the film\u2019s animating force.<\/p>\n
Both actors are elevated by a note-perfect ensemble, including a particularly welcome Smigel (known best for his work in a very different comic register as the puppeteer and voice behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog) as a rabbi who, focused less on faith than finances, putts golf balls into the shofar, as well as relative newcomer Madeline Weinstein as his newly single daughter, Gabby. Though she enters the film an hour in, Weinstein shakes up its second half while enabling two of its standout sequences.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nathan Silver\u2019s \u201cBetween the Temples\u201d opens with a loud, keening blast from the shofar. If you haven\u2019t heard it before, imagine the sound of someone slumped forward in the driver\u2019s seat, face pressed against the steering wheel, and you\u2019ll be in the ballpark. It\u2019s a perfectly bracing note to open this year\u2019s most anxious comedy, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[33,45],"class_list":["post-1511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comedy-movies","tag-comedy","tag-drama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}