A film as eccentric as its main characters, director Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples offers perennial scene stealers Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane the lead roles they’ve long deserved. He’s Ben Gottlieb, a recently widowed cantor in an upstate New York synagogue who finds himself unable to sing; she’s Carla O’Connor (née Kessler), a retired music teacher who decides, 57 years after her 13th birthday, to study for her bat mitzvah. As his grade school teacher, Carla brought music into Ben’s life, and now, at synagogue class, he will bring formal Judaism into hers.
On his first night back at Shabbat services, after taking months off to mourn the accidental death of his novelist wife, Ben (“Cantor Ben,” as he’s lovingly known), freezes up, a song of prayer catching in his throat. He flees, and as he exits the temple he listens to a suggestive phone message from a woman we’ll later learn is his late wife. In the message she apologizes for missing shul and imagines how sexy he looked up on the bimah. “Your Hebrew warbling makes me vibrate,” she says.
Ben ends up in a bar but seems a novice in the setting, which explains how he ends up in a fistfight so quickly. He’s decked, and Carla, who’d been singing karaoke in the back, offers a hand. When she reports that she’s just retired from teaching, the woebegone Ben lights up: He had been her “Little Bennie.” She gave him an A! “It was music class,” Carla declares, “Everybody got A’s.” The next day, as he’s teaching a B’nai Mitzvah class to a group of adolescent boys and girls, in walks Carla, just as class is ending. She wants to join, to study for her long-delayed bat mitzvah. Ben says no, firmly, even insultingly, but a persistent Carla ends up pleading her case in front of Rabbi Bruce (filmmaker Robert Smigel), who can’t resist a new congregant. Little Bennie has no choice. He has a new pupil.
Some of the chief pleasures of Between the Temples are the classroom scenes: Ben using humor to hold the attention of his restless students; Carla reciting her Torah lesson, her face flush with pride at her accomplishment, then using a goofy grade-school breathing lesson to help Ben rediscover his voice. Throughout the movie, he is a lost man — lost in grief and in a crisis of faith, and in middle-age confusion — but in a classroom, Ben knows the language of life. Silver and company have made a comedy about grief and friendship and faith that is also a love letter to the teachers whose lessons mold us for all of our days.
Renowned for his micro-budget indie films, including Uncertain Terms and the wonderful online documentary series Cutting My Mother, Silver, aided by co-writer C. Mason Wells, may be aiming for a wider audience this time out, but his sense of humor remains prickly and his story beats unpredictable. (A blessing.) When she tells Ben the traumatic story of being 13 and not getting a bat mitzvah of her own, she’s not sure he’s listened, so she makes him repeat the story back to her, a demand that feels almost hostile.
Much later, while on a date with the rabbi’s daughter, Gabby (Madeline Weinstein), Ben admits that he listens to old phone messages from his wife, many of them provocative. In what is sure to be one of the more original sex scenes of the film year, Gabby recites back one message, and a moment of seduction is born. The moment is strange and surprising, and, as Schwartzman plays it, familiar. Ben, it would seem, knows from women taking charge.
When Ben and Carla begin studying at her house, he starts sleeping over in the bedroom of her adult son (Matthew Shear), who drops by to visit and is not pleased at the sight of Ben wearing his old pajamas. Ben’s mom (Caroline Aaron) and her partner (Dolly De Leon) are also puzzled about why he’s spending so much time with his bat mitzvah student. When Ben brings Carla for Shabbat dinner, on a night that the Rabbi and Gabby are also invited, all manner of expectations and tensions bubble over.
Carla wasn’t raised in a religious home. Friday night Shabbat dinner is new to her, and so is Ben’s family. Taking her place next to him at the top of the table, she tries to take it all in, to respond to all the competing voices even as she navigates food traditions and prayers she should know better. Both excited and overwhelmed, Carla doesn’t know where to put her hands or where to look, so she swivels left, then right, lest she miss a word or not say the right thing. Fifty years after her Oscar nomination for the immigrant drama Hester Street, Kane is still finding new subtleties, new depths.
The evening will take a turn. Planted deep within an interior reverie, as if he’s been sitting alone at the end of a bar for too long, Ben upends the evening by announcing an epiphany, a thing rarely welcomed at family dinners, Shabbat or otherwise. Melodrama ensues, as it will, and then mania, and later, silence, which is always the scary part. As a filmmaker, Silver takes a leap forward with the dinner party sequence, but his most artful leap may be the soft landing he finds for Ben and Carla the morning after. It’s the loveliest thing: A gentle reprieve, open to prayer and song.
