Two Iconic Oddballs Make the Perfect Pair in Between the Temples

Nathan Silver’s clever Sundance comedy stars Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane, two emblematic weirdos from different eras of American cinema. Photo: Ley Line Entertainment

This review was originally published on January 19, 2024 out of the Sundance Film Festival. We are recirculating it now timed to Between the Temples’s theatrical release.

Amiable and gently comic on the surface, Nathan Silver’s films often exist a degree or two removed from reality. While his characters may live in what looks and feels like the real world, they behave in ways that threaten to tip into absurdity. But Silver presents these people matter-of-factly, accepting their bizarre exchanges and actions not as indulgences in silliness but as manifestations of their fragile humanity. He recognizes that we all act pretty strange sometimes.

Consider Between the Temples, the director’s latest effort. Jason Schwartzman plays Benjamin Gottlieb, an upstate New York cantor who’s lost his voice because he’s mired in grief. One evening, he steps out into the middle of a darkened street and lies down, hoping to die. When a truck screeches to a halt right next to his supine body, Ben gestures for it to go ahead and run him over. (“Keep going, please!�) The next time we see him, he’s hitched a ride on the truck to a local bar, where he picks a fight with another patron and gets punched out. He regains consciousness in the almost-angelic presence of Carla O’Connor (Carol Kane), who was his music teacher back in elementary school. It turns out she wants to finally have her bat mitzvah, because she never got one as a child. Ben and Carla’s growing closeness eventually poses something of a problem because his two mothers (Caroline Aaron and Dolly De Leon) are eager to set him up with a nice young Jewish girl, perhaps even their rabbi’s daughter (Madeline Weinstein), who we are assured is also kind of a mess.

This could easily become the stuff of high-concept shenanigans, and there are passages in Between the Temples that veer close to cringe comedy. But that usually requires a character to find themselves alone and at odds with the world, and Ben’s growing bond with Carla actually serves as a way for him to flee the humiliation that seems to lurk around every corner. The two of them keep the cringe comedy at bay: Every time a situation looks headed toward abject embarrassment for one of them, the other offers a word or a glance that (almost) makes things okay.

Silver has been churning out microbudget features at a steady clip for some time now, usually starring his friends. (Full disclosure: I myself am friendly with a couple of his key collaborators, though I don’t know Silver himself.) This is his highest-profile film to date and the first one to play Sundance. Pairing Schwartzman with Kane turns out to be inspired casting: Here, two iconic oddballs from different eras of American cinema suddenly find each other. He mutters and pauses in the strangest spots, while she has the most wonderful speech patterns to go with that unique voice. (Although it always bears repeating that Kane started out as a dramatic actress, and a very fine one.) They bring completely different energies, but because they’ve never quite fit in with everyone else, their combined chemistry sends the movie into surprising emotional directions.

It’s easy to predict what will happen narratively in Between the Temples, but it’s not nearly as easy to predict what these characters will actually do, what they’ll say and how they’ll act. And there is a difference: In most movies, behavior reveals psychology or moves a tale along. But Silver seems to be fascinated in behavior as behavior. We get the sense that Silver would be perfectly happy just sitting there and watching these people forever, story and conflict and resolution be damned.

And it really is in these characters’ close exchanges that the movie comes to life. When Carla tells Ben about her desire for a bat mitzvah and how she was deprived of one as a child because her parents were Communists (which made her a so-called “red diaper baby�), she makes him repeat everything she just said verbatim. (“You know what I did get on my 13th birthday? My fucking period!�) It could be an incantation, a magic and profane password into their own little world. If repetition in religious texts and rituals offers a pathway to the divine, in the world of Between the Temples it offers a connection to other humans.