Nathan Silver’s “Between the Temples” opens with a loud, keening blast from the shofar. If you haven’t heard it before, imagine the sound of someone slumped forward in the driver’s seat, face pressed against the steering wheel, and you’ll be in the ballpark. It’s a perfectly bracing note to open this year’s most anxious comedy, about a cantor in a crisis of faith who has recently lost his wife, his voice, and his will to live.
Antic, endearing, and often achingly funny, the film stars Jason Schwartzman as Ben Gottlieb, who hasn’t felt at home in his sleepy upstate New York community since the death of his novelist wife in an accident months earlier—literally, given that he’s 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’t exactly lifted his spirits. (“In Judaism, we don’t have heaven or hell,” Ben cracks with a small smile. “We just have upstate New York.”)
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’s 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. “Keep going,” he begs. “Keep going, please!” Humiliating and profound, this punchline isn’t quite introductory—indeed, it’s hard to think of another comedy that starts so strikingly in the moment as this one—but it evokes the dynamic, dizzying swirl of pain and pleasure that, as devised by Silver and co-writer C. Mason Wells, constitutes the film’s comic locus.
Naturally, the driver can’t grant Ben’s 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—perhaps Gabby (Madeleine Weinstein), the daughter of their local rabbi (Robert Smigel)—Ben 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—and she wants Ben to give it to her. He’s 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.
After all, they’re 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 “Mrs. O’Connor” as a warm and encouraging teacher, though the cantor’s even more taken with her candor—she doesn’t remember him at all, she says—and 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’s 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—even 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.
This is Silver’s 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’re saying. “Between the Temples” could be broadly described as a behavioral comedy; it’s not a critique of organized religion but an empathetic study of how people constantly organize and reorganize their relationships to religion—and within that, their relationships to themselves and one another, in response to constantly fluctuating cross-currents of need, desire, and circumstance.
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—not a discovery nor a delusion, but something in between—that neither can quite define or really cares to. Schwartzman, so affecting in last year’s “Asteroid City” 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’s 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’s animating force.
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.
An anxious actress who’s returned home after a failed engagement, Gabby struggles as much as Ben to get her head on straight, as becomes apparent during an erotically charged interlude in a Jewish cemetery that’s about as morbidly hilarious as “Between the Temples” gets. In terms of soul-deep discomfort, though, it has nothing on a disastrous Shabbat dinner at which an intricate latticework of emotional dynamics—confessions, grievances, revelations, humiliations—comes undone in such transcendently shambolic fashion that one suddenly sympathizes with how the door to Ben’s basement door keeps shrieking with the agony of thousand damned souls.
“Between the Temples” was shot in gloriously textured 16mm by frequent collaborator Sean Price Williams, at this point a mainstay of the New York independent film scene whose expressionistic lens is second to none when it comes to capturing the beating heart of chaos. The sense of total immersion in a scene his handheld camera conveys (especially his electrifying focus on faces and facial reactions) modernizes the film’s screwball melodrama. He observes the minutiae of human interaction, often in tight close-ups that move in concert with rapid-fire volleys of incisive dialogue to reach past characters’ deadpan self-defense mechanisms and reveal poignant inner tensions. John Magary’s unpredictable editing, with its skewed staccato rhythms, provides the film with a cheerfully chaotic locomotion that does perhaps even more to keep the audience on their toes.
The film’s premise most immediately recalls the bittersweet May-December romance of “Harold and Maude,” a comparison that the presence of Schwartzman—a frequent collaborator of Wes Anderson, whose tragicomic sensibility and affinity for eccentrics, underdogs, and Cat Stevens certainly owe a debt to Hal Ashby—makes unavoidable. But Silver is working in a more warmly improvisational key, letting in both light and life with such buoyant naturalism that you don’t question the honesty of his characters’ questioning nor the humility—and humanity—of their struggle to self-determine. There’s a core sweetness to “Between the Temples” that shines through. Gently but firmly, the film insists upon the miraculous nature of all the meandering paths we end up taking: in search of our lives, without a clue where we’re going, toward those who’ll give us meaning.
“Between the Temples” is in theaters Friday, via Sony Pictures Classics.