Movie Review: ‘Between the Temples’
Between the Temples; 1 hr, 51 min; rated R; directed by Nathan Silver; in theaters August 22, 2024.
In Between the Temples, the new film from writer/director Nathan Silver (not to be confused with statistician Nate Silver), Jason Schwartzman stars as Ben, a Jewish cantor somewhere in upstate New York grieving the recent loss of his wife Ruth. She was a firecracker, a hard drinking novelist with a striking resemblance to a young Joan Didion, who took a bad fall on the street one winter’s night and busted her head open. Without her, Ben seems to have regressed back to adolescence; he’s living in his mother’s basement, a permanent mope on his face, and donning a big, ugly winter jacket he probably fished out of basement storage. Life would be some kind of purgatory, if the Jews believed in that. Suddenly, an unexpected person re-enters his life—Carla O’Connor, his former grade school music teacher, played by Carol Kane in a revelatory turn. The two are about to change each other’s lives in ways they never expected.
Carla is in her 70’s now, and though she always wanted a bat mitzvah she never had one. As a widow seeking to integrate her life passages, she decides it’s finally time to have one and enlists a skeptical Ben to prepare her for it. Hilariously neurotic hijinks ensue in a tale akin to Harold and Maude (minus the roll in the hay). Despite being in seemingly disparate stages of life, the two embark on a connection that defies categorization. Student and teacher, sure, but it soon becomes clear that the lessons will not be limited to Carla’s Torah portion, much to the chagrin of both Ben and Carla’s families.
Between the Temples is a refreshing comedy that comes at a time when what it means to be Jewish in America seems especially ripe for debate. In preparing Carla for her bat mitzvah, the odd couple have unleashed a flood of unsolicited opinions from friends and family on the right and wrong way to do things—not only in Jewish tradition, but in life itself. What does Jewish tradition have to say about the right way to grieve? The importance of family? Whether it’s acceptable to use a shofar as a makeshift golf hole for in-office putting practice? To answer some of these difficult questions, we have our rituals and customs. They make the gray areas of life much easier to manage, don’t they? They also have historically kept our diasporic people together in a world that has often seemed intent on tearing us apart.
Between the Temples often plays like a Mel Brooks movie reimagined as a Sundance film; nothing is off-limits.
Of course our commitment to ritual means that there are endless setups and punch lines waiting to be executed. Thankfully, in the United States humor is as much a part of Jewish tradition as matzah ball soup. Between the Temples often plays like a Mel Brooks movie reimagined as a Sundance film; nothing is off-limits, whether it be suicide, interfaith marriage or the Holocaust. There are a relentless number of gags, not only presented in characters’ words and actions but in the sound design and cinematography: the constant murmur of voices and overlapping dialogue as a symphonic representation of a Jewish family dinner, the steady pouring of wine, wine and more wine. I suppose one could take offense at some of the humor, but for the sake of survival, we Jews have had to be able to laugh at ourselves. If we couldn’t, we would find the world to be quite the inhospitable place, more inhospitable than it already is.
Yet Between the Temples isn’t just a comedy about Judaism, it is also a touching exploration of the ways in which rules, rituals and customs can limit us. As much as they serve to bind us together, they can also divide when deployed as rigid purity tests. One of the reasons that Carla never had a bat mitzvah is that her parents were communists who strongly objected to organized religion. Not only that, but her mother was not Jewish. I found this particularly powerful, as it related to my own story.
As a Jew with a non-Jewish mother, I’ve been told at various points in my life that I am not really Jewish. One hundred percent of the time, it is fellow Jews doing it, and my response has always been—then what was all that Sunday school and Hebrew school for? (It should be noted that Jason Schwartzman is likewise only half Jewish, on his father’s side. The nephew of the famously Italian-American Francis Ford Coppola, his mother is Talia Shire of Rocky fame). Why did I have a bar mitzvah? If I’m not really Jewish, then what was up with all that Jewish stuff I did? At one point, Ben wanders into a Catholic church and has a discussion with a priest. Comparing the religions, Ben notes that as Jews we have no concept of heaven or hell. “What about doing good for the time that you’re here and not worrying about later?” he asks. It’s that line between belief and action that Between the Temples does such a good job of exploring. If Judaism is about what we do with the time we have on earth, then why such an emphasis on things that are beyond our control?
To that end, Between the Temples wants us to embrace our hypocrisies, not cast them aside. Why is it that you can’t get a tattoo but you can get atrocious plastic surgery? Sure, you can’t combine meat and dairy, but if you accidentally take a few bites of a cheeseburger, can you not admit how delicious it tastes? Life is precious, and if all it takes for a life to disappear are a few stiff drinks and a slip on the ice, then what does it really matter if your mother was Episcopalian or that you can’t take photos of Shabbat dinner?
The movie begins with the sound of a shofar, a call to attention. Appropriate, since the movie itself feels like a particularly hilarious sermon on the state of being Jewish in modern-day America.
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Andy Freedman is a film critic based in Philadelphia, PA
Top Image: Jason Schwartzman (L) as Ben Gottlieb and Carol Kane (R) as Carla Kessler in Between the Temples. Image: Sean Price Williams. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.