Losing It

Between the Temples a film by Nathan Silver.  With Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Robert Smigel, Caroline Aaron, Madeleine Weinstein.  Streaming on Netflix.  ****

Between the Temples has a homegrown, home-movieish feeling that I associate with movies from the sixties and seventies (the golden age of cinema as far as I’m concerned).  From the opening shot, where a Rabbi of what I take to be a Reformed synagogue is leading the group while urging his cantor to take over, and the cantor, with a terrified look on his face, flees the whole scene (like the couple of the end of The Graduate), this doesn’t seem like a movie from 2024.  That’s a good thing, as far as I’m concerned.

The cantor in question, Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman), is unable to sing because his wife died some months before, robbing him of his voice.  Everybody is rooting for him, including his mother Meira (Caroline Aaron), her lover Judith (Dolly De Leon), Rabbi Bruce himself (Robert Smigel), and the whole congregation in the small town of Sedgewick in upstate New York, but it’s no use.  He’s lost his mojo and he’s lost his voice.  As someone who went through the same kind of trauma early in life, I sympathize.

He’s saved by a kind of miracle[1]: he runs into the woman who discovered his musical talent in the first place, his grade school music teacher, Mrs. O’Connor (Carol Kane), who is now retired.  Not only is there the coincidence of running into each other, it just so happens that she wants to connect with her Jewish roots, and he’s teaching a class to prepare young people for the Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.  He’s a little surprised that “Mrs. O’Connor” is Jewish at all, but she tells him her husband died some years before and that her maiden name was Carla Kessler (“Is that Jewish enough for you?”).  She never did a Bat Mitzvah because her parents were Communists and atheists, opposed to religion.  Carla, in her old age, is having doubts about her atheism (and happens to know that the first Bat Mitzvah was held almost exactly one hundred years before).  When she shows up at his class, he is initially flustered (there she is, surrounded by twelve-year-olds), but she’s not bothered at all.  She missed out on this and wants to do it now.  She’s serious.

This plot has all the earmarks of a Hallmark special, especially if Ben’s wife died some noble death.  We already suspect, though, that we’re not on the Hallmark channel, because after failing at the temple, Ben headed to the local bar to down a few of his favorite drinks (a weird concoction called a mud slide), got in a bar fight and got clobbered, and eventually made it home to his mother and her lesbian lover.  And his wife didn’t die a noble death.  She was an alcoholic novelist who slipped and fell on the ice and hit her head, apparently on the way home from a bar.  We don’t discover this detail until way into the movie.  Not only that, her one published novel was rather racy, and in the course of their marriage she left Ben over 200 pornographic voice mails.  He’s kept every one.  He doesn’t talk about how he adored his wife, or his attitude toward her racy writing (which might have conflicted with his work at the synagogue); he just seems confused.  He still seems to be in shock.  Carla—with her past as a music teacher and her advice about belly breathing—seems like the perfect antidote.

There are complications on her side as well.  Her son Nat, who has a wife and two daughters, is a therapist, which sounds good.  Unfortunately, he’s also a devout atheist, is unbelievably controlling of his mother (won’t even let her have a drink at a restaurant) and seems weirdly jealous of and aggressive toward Ben (he did first meet him when Ben had spent the night at his mother’s house, and was sleeping in Nat’s pajamas).

Furthermore, Rabbi Bruce has a daughter who has had relationship problems and has been depressed.  She comes to visit, and is not only turned on by Ben; she’s also turned on by his wife’s sexy novel and those raunchy voice mails.  This young woman, named Gabby (Madeleine Weinstein), is quite lovely, and might be a good match for Ben.  But by that time he’s in love with Carla for saving his life, and in a hilarious Shabbat dinner the night before her Bat Mitzvah, everybody’s motives and messages get confused.

There are any number of other things that make this movie feel like a throwback.  Not only does the booze flow freely in this rather religious little movie, Carla has a woman friend in her house (is she just a friend?) who serves them both some tea that apparently has hallucinogenic properties; soon Ben, and the viewer, are seeing visions of his younger self and all kinds of wild things.  The movie plays with Jewish stereotypes—a no no in these politically fraught times—and doesn’t worry about them at all.  Not only is it often hilariously funny, it’s charmingly offbeat, and rather sweet.

I don’t think the movie is seriously suggesting that this unlikely pair will become lovers, though Ben is confused enough that he’d probably give it a try.  Carla would stop him.  It’s about a man healing from trauma, and a woman who sees what he needs.  It portrays a woman—as Ben says at one point—who shows us what a truly Jewish person should be, though she’s hardly been to a synagogue.  She and Ben love each other, but not that way (as Barney Bigard says about old Aunt Harriet).  They give each other what they both need, and if a few feelings are hurt in the process, so be it.  Ben’s problem may just be “between the temples.”  That doesn’t mean that it isn’t real.

[1] Which seems unlikely in various ways.  One thing I wondered, about this rather small community, is why they hadn’t run into each other before.