As the commercial cinema has become more narrowly controlled between a handful of tiers and types of cinema that are more carefully-managed than ever, we’ve lost along the way that rarest, crucial pleasure for the cinephile – a director working in a commercial genre who’s able to get away with something sneakily subversive. Between the Temples is such a movie; at least, if you know Sony Pictures Classics. Their fondness for targeting frequent moviegoers by combining a legendary older actor beloved by boomers and Gen X with a younger actor to interest millennials in a sell-you-in-a-sentence premise is, if not their whole business model, a substantial portion of it. Look at Wicked Little Letters, Freud’s Last Session, The Father, French Exit, or, further back, Still Alice. There’s a reason they were on the Woody Allen train for so long. This is tried and true and, as those examples demonstrate, not typically a recipe for the most cutting-edge cinema. Their business is the upper end of middlebrow, and they navigate those waters very well (I like nearly all those movies, for what it’s worth).
Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples suggests more of the same – a young cantor (Jason Schwartzman) undergoing a personal and religious crisis is suddenly tasked with preparing an elderly woman (Carol Kane), his former music teacher, for her bat mitzvah. Not a hard sell. Sounds delightful. And it’s not not delightful. But it’s also about a man who, as he settles into middle age, has an active death wish. Ben Gottlieb (Schwartzman) lost his wife; long enough ago that his family is trying to set him up, recently enough that he abjectly does not want to even try. He doesn’t even really want to live. When he reencounters Carla (Kane), he’s blackout drunk and just trying to pass the time.
Schwartzman is excellent at this sort of droll despair, from his entry in cinema in Rushmore on through last year’s Asteroid City (and, in between, other films not directed by Wes Anderson, though at least a couple by Alex Ross Perry). His understanding of the way people can be tender and foolish at the same time is on full display, always playing the grim determination for momentary restitution for the sad lot he’s been dealt at war with the fact that he may at any moment cry. The script, by Silver and C. Mason Wells (they last collaborated on Silver’s little-seen and not-terrific Thirst Street), is consistently witty on its own, but comes by it from a place of depressive compensation. Its portrait of grief is far from morbid; it’s much more concerned with the minute-to-minute, day-to-day actions, all the mistakes and misplaced remarks and fumbled outreach.
When Carla comes to his door, he is first resistant, only really coerced into it by his budget-conscious rabbi (Robert Smigel), always game for another member at the temple. But he soon finds in her a sympathetic voice, an eager student, a supportive friend, and…a bond he wasn’t sure he was open to, so to speak. Kane, too rarely given such a dynamic spotlight, is as good as she’s ever been, impulsive and wise. The escalating conflict between Ben’s family’s expectations for him, Carla’s family’s expectations on her, and both of their individual expectations for themselves is all played in their own reflexes to each moment; nothing terribly thought-out, each action an expression of an inner voice they can’t quite form. In one of the film’s more literal touches, Ben suddenly finds himself having trouble singing. How ever will he overcome this? It is despite these touches, not particularly because of them, that the film succeeds, and its wit and clarity makes it easy to forgive them.
Technical merits are especially exemplary. Stalwarts of the New York independent scene Sean Price Williams and John Magary provide the cinematography and editing, respectively. Williams, one of the contemporary cinema’s best and most electric voices, captures each scene as though he were trying to outrun a lit fuse, with Magary’s cutting snipping the ends only to relight the new section. Can an editor, whose work is commonly done after the film is shot, influence its shooting? Their collaboration suggests it.
Charming enough to take the adults in your family, subversive enough to recommend to your savvy friends, Between the Temples burns a little more potently than it might initially suggest, and suggests Silver as an exciting voice to challenge the mainstream.
Which actors were targeting boomers in Wicked Little Letters?
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