Review: Between The Temples

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Cantor Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) lost his wife to an accident about a year before "Between the Temples" starts, but when we meet him he has also lost his voice - it is his duty to lead the congregation in prayer via song - and seemingly his will to go on.

Ben is living with his well-meaning mother (Caroline Aaron) and her somewhat overbearing wife (Dolly De Leon), who continually try to hook their grieving son up with other women in their small, upstate New York community. The most awkward moment is an introduction involving a plastic surgeon who wants Ben to feel how firm her face is.

While Ben finds a momentary note of inspiration in a car with his rabbi boss's daughter (Madeline Weinstein), his biggest boost comes from befriending Carla Kessler (Carol Kane), his childhood music teacher whom he bumps into at a bar after getting punched during a dispute with another man. 

Carla tends to Ben and upon learning that he helps youngsters at his synagogue undergo the year-long preparation for their bar or bat mitzvahs, she decides she wants to have her own, even though her son points out that she's technically Protestant and far too old to have one. Regardless, Ben is inspired by the vigor with which Carla pursues this interest and a friendship forms, much to the chagrin of her son.

Both Carla and Ben have lost their spouses and over the course of the film's often nutty 110 minutes, they bond over non-kosher hamburgers, seemingly hallucinogenic tea, and Hebrew lessons. She's a little too young to be Maude and he's far too old to be Harold, but there's a similar vibe - minus the obsession with death - to this pair's relationship.

This is a film that draws some hilarity from awkward scenarios, from a strangely erotic sequence in a Jewish cemetery to a dinner involving most of the film's prime characters that becomes increasingly uncomfortable when Ben decides to be a little less formal than the occasion probably necessitates.

"Between the Temples" takes a little while to get going, but once it does it's effective - often funny and occasionally soulful, due to the work of Kane and Schwartzman, who also nailed the role of a grieving spouse in last year's "Asteroid City." This is a solid little comedy that grew on me.