In a sleepy town in upstate New York, Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman), the subject of writer-director Nathan Silver’s off-kilter Jewish comedy Between the Temples, isn’t doing very well. His wife, an alcoholic novelist, died a year earlier after slipping on an icy sidewalk. He’s a cantor at the local temple, but lost his singing voice. Schlubby, unshaven, eyes downcast, Ben shuffles through life in a daze, disillusioned with his faith and uninterested in the overt romantic set-ups by his overbearing Jewish moms (Caroline Aaron and Dolly De Leon). “Even my name is in the past tense,” he laments, an incisive complaint-joke in a film full of them. At one point early in the film, co-written by C Mason Wells, Ben lays in front of a truck and asks it to keep going.
Not that Between the Temples is a slog, or even particularly dark. Captured in the nostalgic glow of cinematographer Sean Price Williams’s roving 16mm camera, Ben’s malaise is warm and inviting. Being alive is tough, funny, awkward and embarrassing business, and Silver is finely attuned toward life’s strange run-offs and unexpected connections. Between the Temples radiates a wry and compelling view on life, from its punny title to its offbeat, capital-C characters – particularly once Ben, drunk off too many mudslides (humiliating) and nursing a punched face, reconnects with his grade-school music teacher, Carla Kessler O’Connor (a delightful Carol Kane).
