By Jake Coyle, Film Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --In Nathan Silver’s divinely disordered screwball “Between the Temples,” Jason Schwartzman plays a grieving cantor who, after the death of his wife, can’t sing anymore but who finds a strange kinship with a much older widow ( Carol Kane ) seeking her bat mitzvah.
Yes, that old story. But even that brief synopsis doesn’t really begin to hint at the singularity โ or the delight โ of “Between the Temples.” The movie’s grammar โ 16mm, improvisational, shot purposeful erratically by Sean Price Williams โ is just as antic as its story. In this winningly chaotic comedy, you can almost feel the characters and filmmakers, as one, resisting order and pushing back against convention.
That makes for an experience as volatile and hilarious as it is sweet and profound. That’s particularly due to Schwartzman and Kane who, as a pair with some echoes of Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon in “Harold and Maude,” make for the best canter-elderly bat mitzvah student duo you’ve ever seen, or, more simply, the most memorable on-screen duo of the year.
This is Silver’s ninth feature and possibly his finest. “Between the Temples,” playful, loose and dead set against any moment coming off as too polished or rehearsed, is always very close to falling into shambles. Or maybe it does, perpetually, but has the spirit, or foolhardiness, to keep going. With disaster ever present, “Between the Temples” ambles its way toward a scruffy, endearing magic of its own.
Ben Gottlieb (Schwartzman) works at a synagogue in upstate New York, but after losing his wife to a freak accident, he’s lost his singing voice and, maybe, his faith. Ben has moved back in with his mother Meira (Caroline Aaron) and her meddlesome wife Judith (Dolly de Leon). In the movie’s opening moments, they introduce Ben up with a young woman, a doctor. He doesn’t get that this is a date; he assumes she’s a therapist. When he learns she’s a plastic surgeon, he asks his mom: “Do you think I need work done?”
But the work Ben needs goes deeper than that. “Even my name’s in the past tense,” he sighs. After listlessly sitting through temple alongside Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel, inspired casting), he walks outside and lies down in traffic. Nursing his grief over a mudslide at a bar (a drink the barman perceptively chooses for him), he gets into a fight. After Ben gets clocked, the woman who picks him up, having finished her karaoke performance, is Carla (Carol Kane). She helps him through a drunken night before they realize she was his music teacher in elementary school. “Little Benny!” she exclaims once the memory returns.
Carla soon appears at the synagogue and tells Ben she wants a bar mitzvah. He doesn’t agree until she persists, but they soon find they fluctuate to some similar wavelength of grief and oddballness. Whether she’s an appropriate age for the coming-of-age ceremony is one question, but it’s also not entirely clear if Carla is even Jewish. While the Torah plays a role in the unfolding friendship, their connection โ whether it’s love is hard to say โ is only partly related to Judaism. They share stories of their dead spouses over burgers that Ben learns, while chewing, aren’t kosher. Silver films the scene in close-ups of their mouths. What seems clearer, in the script by Silver and C. Mason Wells, is that the two are together finding their way through a hard chapter of life and into another of their own making.
Along the way, there are surreal flourishes, moments of supreme awkwardness and comic high points. One scene, with Carla’s skeptical son and his family at a steak house, is adorned with ridiculously large menus. Silver has apparent affection for filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and John Cassavetes, but scenes like that one reminded me of Elaine May.
There is a wonderful feeling in “Between the Temples” that anything can happen at any moment. That’s particularly true in another dinner scene, one sensationally awkward, that brings all the characters together, including the more age-appropriate Gabby (Madeline Weinstein, terrific), the rabbi’s daughter.
Yet in a movie filled with strange noises (Ben’s door shrieks more than creaks) and snuffed-out singing voices, nothing sounds as good as the patter between Kane (who still says “Geez” better than any human being alive) and Schwartzman. The unique rhythm of their voices pushes “Between the Temples,” a film about finding your own faith, to something beautiful. “Music,” Carla says, “is the sound that you make.”
“Between the Temples,” a Sony Pictures Classics release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language and some sexual references. Running time: 111 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
Review: Director-Writer Megan Park’s “My Old Ass”
They say tripping on psychedelic mushrooms triggers hallucinations, anxiety, paranoia and nervousness. In the case of Elliott, an 18-year-old restless Canadian, they prompt a visitor.
"Dude, I'm you," says the guest, as she nonchalantly burns a 'smores on a campfire next to a very high and stunned Elliott. "Well, I'm a 39-year-old you. What's up?"
What's up, indeed: Director-writer Megan Park has crafted a wistful coming-of-age tale using this comedic device for "My Old Ass" and the results are uneven even though she nails the landing.
After the older Elliott proves who she is โ they share a particular scar, childhood memories and a smaller left boob โ the time-travel advice begins: Be nice to your brothers and mom, and stay away from a guy named Chad.
"Can we hug?" asks the older Elliott. They do. "This is so weird," says the younger Elliott, who then makes things even weirder when she asks for a kiss โ to know what it's like kissing yourself. The older Elliott soon puts her number into the younger's phone under the name "My Old Ass." Then they keep in touch, long after the effects of the 'shrooms have gone.
Part of the movie's problem that can't be ignored is that the two Elliotts look nothing alike. Maisy Stella plays the coltish young version and a wry Aubrey Plaza the older. Both turn in fine performances but the visuals are slowly grating.
The arrival of the older Elliott coincides with her younger self counting down the days until she can flee from her small town of 300 in the Muskoka Lakes region to college in Toronto, where "my life is about to start." She's sick of life on a cranberry farm.
Park's scenes and dialogue are unrushed and honest as Elliott takes her older self's advice and tries to repair... Read More