Seemingly not wasting one of its 111 offbeat minutes, sprawling and long for a comedy, but not undeserved here, Nate Silver’s “Between The Temples” begins with immediate hilarity. Ben Gottlieb (a terrific Jason Schwartzman) is a sad sack cantor living at home. In a concerned setting that resembles an intervention, his two moms (birth mom Caroline Aaron, partner Dolly De Leon) ask him if he needs to see a doctor. Ben reluctantly agrees, and boom, a therapist walks in the door seconds later. Worse, however, this isn’t a spontaneous shrink session but rather a date Ben’s moms planned without his knowledge, and yes, it ends poorly.
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Silver’s movie, a rollicking screwball comedy with hysterical manic energy, announces itself right away with riotously clever and clipped editing that punctuates much of the humor. But there’s also a soft, soulful glow and intimate personal touch strewn through it all. Gottlieb is a Jewish cantor, and we quickly learn he’s in all kinds of crises, spiritual, emotional, and otherwise. His wife, an alcoholic, passed away in a freak accident while drunk in the snow, and Gottlieb’s been mourning ever since, living at home with his moms in low-wattage recovery. Worse, he essentially can’t sing anymore, and any time he tries to intone in the temple, he chokes and flees, the rabbi (a side-splittingly droll Robert Smigel) looking on in dismay.
With Gottlieb’s life in shambles, his moms trying to make unplanned J-Dates for him and all (LOL, this scene), he drinks, slurping up chocolate cocktails made by the prying, seemingly ubiquitously present and commenting bartender (deadpan Silver regular Keith Poulson). Soon, his life is thrown into upheaval when an older woman in her ’50 he met at the bar on a drunken bender, Carla O’Connor (Carol Kane), turns up at his Hebrew school, wanting to be Bat Mitzvahed. It also turns out she was his grade school teacher as a kid; she wants to be his adult student, and the tables have suddenly turned.
But what could have simply been a diverting comedy of inconvenience— Carla as an unwanted hassle, demanding to be Bat Mitvahed despite questionable Jewish heritage—turns into something more affecting and reflective as their friendship grows into something more meaningful and sympatico. At the same time, Silver’s pace and riotously abrupt comedic timing (big props to the purposefully hasty editing) don’t let up, creating an eccentric picture that still jibes and feels wholly original.
Silver reteams with most of the critical principals of his deeply underrated hysterical black comedy “Thirst Street,” co-writer C. Mason Wells, superb cinematographer Sean Price Williams, and editor John Magary, and the results with ‘Temple’ are as deliriously amusing. That undervalued indie gem prized what felt like a collision of cinephile influences into one dynamic and distinctive stew, and “Between The Temples” seems to apply a similar approach. The film also begs the question to literate cineastes: what if Hal Ashby and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (especially in one of his crowded ensemble dramas) made a plucky screwball comedy as if shot by John Huston’s cinematographer on “Fat City” (the wonderful Conrad L. Hall who made naturalistic sleaze look so wonderfully authentic). “Between The Temples” has big “beautiful losers” energy, a vitality that all the previously mentioned filmmakers leaned into at least once.
So many delightfully sly elements add to the picture’s irreverent nature, including a Jewish ‘70s folk pop soundtrack (Arik Einstein, Shmulik Kraus, Shlomo Gronich), which essentially asks, what if Wes Anderson’s early deep cuts were kosher? Stylistically, it also employs inventive cinematic grammar (zooms, freeze frames, sped-up sequences during a hilarious hallucinogenic mushroom trip) to the point that it might overwhelm a less accomplished picture (also kudos to crafty comedic moments like making a sneeze or loud cough a great burst of physical comedy)
But despite the eccentricity, which rarely relents—mind you, much of this shambolic picture is improvised too—“Between The Temples” never loses sight of its core emotional depth. Schwartzman and Kane are so wonderful in the picture, up for all the hijinks but keeping the picture also rooted in its underlying melancholy with their affecting authenticity, which never lets up no matter how zany the movie gets. Arguably, this is the film’s brilliance; it’s so deeply idiosyncratic, baggy, and even wacky, but the way it always seems to stay tethered to the sad and lovely idea of two lonely lost souls who may have found each other in this difficult life really resonates and keeps the picture from becoming just a wildly madcap romp.
“Between The Temples” features a big, expansive cast, as well (Madeline Weinstein and Matthew Shear too), many of whom are there for the film’s crescendo, a vigorous and eventually agitated dinner party that collects all the characters and quickly goes (entertainingly) south (Dolly De Leon as Ben’s fussy, type-A Filipino mom is also so subtly funny).
Ultimately, “Between The Temples” is achingly, evenly deceptively sweet and from the heart. It’s a dexterously comic but moving examination of a life interrupted, seemingly demolished, and a life of unfulfilled dreams, clashing, colliding, and perhaps finding a tender togetherness that suggests second chances and no term limits on coming of age. [B+]
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