I love seeing slice-of-life movies that deal with various cultures and or religious backgrounds. The latest film is about a man who is dealing with a form of religion and his role in it is Between the Temples. Nathan Silver is a prolific director who’s made a lot of movies in a short period of time. This one though seems like it’s his most autobiographical to me. It’s a small quaint little film that he made for a specific subset of America. In other words, it’s not for everybody.

Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) is a single middle-aged, slightly overweight man who lives with his two mothers in upstate New York. He’s a cantor for his local synagogue, Temple Sinai. This means he teaches classes for mainly younger people to get their bat mitzvahs.  His mother wants him to find a girl and settle down, but he’s a bit awkward and antisocial.  While out one day he runs into his old music teacher Carla Kessler (Carol Kane) They start to talk and one thing leads to another and she wants to get her bat mitzvah and she wants him to teach her. This leads to some oddly interesting situations.

Jason Schwartzman is an actor who usually co-stars in films from Wes Anderson and so forth. He’s not the main star of a movie most of the time. I tend to like him in smaller roles. His shtick is best served in smaller doses. As the lead, he annoyed me quite a bit. Maybe because this is a semi-autobiographical film it’s about the director. Who knows? So maybe he was the annoying one. I don’t know. I do know this character bothered me and I didn’t like the decisions he was making throughout the movie.

The supporting cast was almost as annoying as the main character was. The two moms of Ben were played by Dolly De Leon and Caroline Aaron. I understand trying to get your son to meet people on J Dates and so forth, but they were a bit over-dramatic in their pursuits.  Robert Smigal played Rabbi Bruce and he was okay most of the time until close to the end when he also started to annoy me. His daughter Leah was played by Pauline Chalamet,  yes the sister of Timothee Chalamet. She is the most normal person in this entire movie. I definitely would have been interested in her if I was the main character, that’s for sure.

Carol Kane is an interesting character though. She thought of Schwartzman’s character as a child and now she’s getting him to teach her something she should have learned years before. Because of her back story, she wasn’t able to. I just don’t see the attraction the two have for one another. This scenario leads to some awkward situations for the pair and the rest of the characters in the cast.  I’m just glad this wasn’t my family story. I don’t know what I would have done in this situation. It’s just strange to me. Kane makes the most of her character though. She seems to play her as pretty oblivious to what is truly going on.

As a nonpracticing catholic myself I have found religion of any kind hard to follow along with. Judaism is one of the stranger religions for me. All the stuff involves not being able to eat certain foods, they call it kosher, being circumcised, and so forth, and not being able to celebrate Christmas or Easter. They have Hanukkah instead of Christmas. I’m not saying it’s a bad religion or anything, it’s just hard for me to understand because I’m not Jewish. The whole film being set around this was hard for me to comprehend.  What I’m saying it’s it wasn’t geared forward for me so in turn it wasn’t for me.

Between the Temples focuses mainly on the Jewish religion and the families and characters surrounding that religion. I had a hard time understanding what was going on most of the time. Jason Schwartzman is usually pretty good in small doses here he is used way too much and I found him very annoying most of the time. Kane made the most of her character, but she didn’t bother me as much as the main character did. If I were in this situation I would have handled things differently. That’s probably the main reason I wasn’t a fan of this story or movie. 

2 stars

Dan Skip Allen