Between the Temples 2024 with Jason Schwartzman Movie Review

 

Between the Temples 2024

A New Film Comments on Jewish Identity

Between the Temples is a 2024 traumedy feature film. "Traumedy" is a genre term for a film that mixes trauma and comedy. Between the Temples stars Jason Schwartzman as Ben Gottlieb, a depressed, middle-aged cantor living in upstate New York. He has retreated to the basement of a home belonging to his mother Meira and his mother's wife Judith (Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon). Ben's wife died over a year before the film begins. Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel) allows Ben to assume his cantor's chair in front of the congregation during synagogue services, even though Ben has lost his ability to sing. Carla O'Connor (Carol Kane) was, decades earlier, Ben's grade school music teacher. She is now his septuagenarian bat mitzvah student.

Between the Temples was directed and co-written by Nathan Silver. Silver has made low-budget independent films that play at film festivals rather than obtaining wide release. He has often featured friends and relatives in his casts. Between the Temples is an hour and fifty-one minutes long. It was released in the US on August 22, 2024.

Temples has a distinctive look. The film stock is color and it is grainy. Silver shot on 16 mm of "rare Kodak film stock … we pushed at two stops" to make the film "less contrasty and it kind of gave it this look of these Soviet films that we used as our our guide." Silver says he wanted the film to have an "analog" look, to mirror Carla, an older character who was in her prime back in the 1970s. The movie poster's New Spirit Condensed font is also a throwback to the 1970s, and the soundtrack includes Hebrew language songs by Boaz Sharabi, who was popular in Israel in the 1970s.

The camera is handheld and shots are often jerky. Shots focus tightly on human faces. In one scene all the viewer sees is a person's nostrils, lips, and teeth, as the character eats. In a low-budget film, such tight close-ups eliminate the need for set design.

Professional critics lavish the film with praise. Audiences not so much. Rottentomatoes awards Between the Temples a proud 86% score from professional reviewers. Amateur reviews at the site, though, average out to a failing 40% score.

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for the New York Times. Dargis labels Temples a "critic's pick." Ben Gottlieb, the film's main character, is, she says, a "touchingly soulful … sad sack." The film is "soulful, delightfully tetchy."

Dargis praises Temple's distinctive camera work. "Sean Price Williams' agitated cinematography and the jumpy rhythms of John Magary's editing" well served the film's switchbacking from "plaintive to humorous." Director and co-writer Silver is, Dargis says, "a sharp, clear-eyed observer of human nature."

Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker, elevates Temples to a serious commentary on Jewish life and identity. Director Silver, Brody says, "expands his emotional range and his scope of action while delving into secular Jewish life and its interface with organized religion. The movie was shot in early 2023, before the October 7th attacks on Israel and the massacres in Gaza, thus turning it, in effect, into a historical drama of American Jewry … it's a scathing vision of the routines of Jewish life, from its formalities and rules to its institutions and social habits—and a gentle look at those who find comfort in its verities." For Brody, Temples warrants comparison to one of the most honored of Jewish American novelists. "Silver's movie advances the satirical and critical sensibility of Philip Roth's early years, as in the collection Goodbye Columbus." Brody admires Sean Price Williams' herky-jerky, handheld camera work. "Williams is among the most important artists in modern independent filmmaking. His handheld-camera work, which borrows from the methods of cinéma-vérité documentaries, turns the camera into a participant, a virtual character in the proceedings. Here, his roving, darting images are as confrontational and impassioned as the events that they capture."

In Kveller, Lior Zaltzman is over the moon. Temples causes Zaltzman to feel that "all of my wildest Jewish movie-lover dreams come true … Between the Temples kept me brimming with Jewish joy and wonder … I loved the movie so much. I came out feeling kind of high." Zaltzman chatted with director Nathan Silver and Robert Smigel, who played Rabbi Bruce. In the interview, Smigel says, "I was very emotional from the bat mitzvah scene, because it just embodies so much of what's beautiful about this religion, and religion in general, when it's applied right."

HeyAlma, an online publication geared to single, Jewish, millennial women, assesses Temples as "a laugh-out-loud funny, viscerally recognizable and, at times, profoundly uncomfortable sketch of contemporary Jewish life and fulfillment … Between the Temples represents the Yiddish concept of hereness in disapora." Evelyn Frick, the author of the above quoted HeyAlma article, specifies that her pronouns are "she/they."

Dan Bayer at The Next Best Picture website is less enthusiastic. Bayer condemns the handheld camera's "smash zooms, herky-jerky camera movement, extreme close-ups, whip pans, and insert shots." Bayer concedes that "if nothing else" Temples "brings an authentic representation of Judaism to the screen."

Given such praise from professional reviewers, what, then, to make of comments like the following? At Rottentomatoes, one reads from amateur reviewers that Temples offers "incoherent plot and impossible, unlikely relationships that showed disrespect without redeeming qualities." And, "This is one of the worst movies I have seen … Too many close ups! It was dizzying … Trying to be clever and failing. I walked out. I have only walked out on one other movie in over 50 years of moving going."

What is one to make of this amateur review, from the Internet Movie Database, "I cannot in good conscience give this dumpster fire of a movie a balanced review. It does not deserve one. Nor does it deserve even a 1-star rating. Instead, I'm offering a public service announcement, a warning to anyone contemplating seeing it. Please do not. Trust me on this; you will lose the will to live."

Google reviews lists a minority of five-star reviews, a few two-, three-, and four-star reviews, and a majority of one-star reviews. From one such review, "The sex scene inside a car. That was a particular joy to experience with my rabbi sitting next to me … Summary: Just awful. Don't do it. Whoever directed this mess should be prohibited from ever directing again - also, just to be safe, from ever seeing a movie again." And another, "If antisemites had shown up to prevent me from seeing this amateurish drivel and I never was able to see it, I would have saved some money and not wasted 111 minutes of my life … the scene where the Rabbi's daughter practices fellatio on the cantor in a car parked in a Jewish cemetery … is a blatant example of gratuitous sex." And another, "for liberals for the democratic side … I am Jewish and cannot find much humor in that … Wait until politics are put in place and people can make jokes again without dei blm lgtbq transgender woke bs." And another, a reviewer with an Ashkenazi-sounding name, "The scene around the Friday night Shabbat table was excruciating." And, "Pathetic interpretation of Jewish life and interactions." And, "It belittles Judaism and the Jewish people. Someone wrote that since the writers are Jewish it can't be anti- Semitic. No, it is! This movie could have been produced by Goebbels."

This review, below, will offer a summary of the plot of Between the Temples. Warning: this summary will reveal the ending of the movie. If you don't want to know how the movie ends, you should stop reading now. After that, I'll offer my own reaction to the film.

Temples opens with the sound of a shofar. The shofar, a ram's horn transformed into a wind instrument, produces a signature Jewish sound. My Jewish Learning lists ten weighty interpretations of a shofar's sound. With this opening blast, the film announces that it sees itself as commenting on Jewishness. Later in the film, Rabbi Bruce will be seen in his office using a golf club to putt a golf ball into the opening in a shofar. This comic touch from an actor, Robert Smigel, better known for irreverent, sexually explicit (see here), and obscene comedy (see here) than for religious reverence, signals the film's less than orthodox approach to religion.

Ben appears. He is middle-aged. (Jason Schwartzman is 44.) Ben has thick five o'clock shadow. His greasy, splotchy skin suggests that he has not been engaging in hygiene. He is overweight and dressed in loose slob attire. He mopes. Ben will maintain this sloppy, hangdog appearance throughout the film.

Ben's two mothers confront him. One is apparently his birth mother; the other, a Filipina, is a convert to Judaism. The two women are a lesbian couple. They intensely nag Ben throughout the film. He slumps and whimpers and never manages to resist their nagging. He is living in their basement.

Ben's two Jewish mothers insist that it's time he saw a doctor. An attractive, young cosmetic surgeon enters and encourages Ben to touch her face. She says that she has had expert plastic surgery. Ben is confused. "Do you think I need work done?" He comes to realize that the doctor is there as a blind date. Ben's mothers want him to marry a doctor. He has no interest in dating this woman.

Ben is in a synagogue, wearing a prayer shawl. Though he is the synagogue's cantor, he can't bring himself to sing. He abruptly departs from the synagogue. We learn later that Rabbi Bruce does not fire Ben and replace him because Ben's mothers are "big donors to the temple." Ben lies down in front of an oncoming truck, and thus attempts suicide. The truck driver comes to a stop to avoid running over Ben. If I heard correctly, Ben shouts, twice, "Be a Goy!" Again, if I heard this right, Ben is suggesting to the truck driver that he kill Ben because killing Jews is what Goys do. Instead, the truck driver escorts Ben to a bar.

The bartender immediately sizes Ben up as a liquor virgin. Without being told to do so, he serves Ben a mudslide, a sweet cocktail made with chocolate and cream. It is served in a stemmed, globe glass, that is, the kind of glass that might contain an ice cream sundae. It is not a manly drink.

A tall, blonde man, accompanied by a pretty woman, bullies Ben. Ben is wearing a yarmulke and drinking a mudslide. One can deduce that the bully is an antisemite. Ben asks what the tall blonde man is laughing at. "Nothing" the bully says. Ben insists that he is not nothing. The bully punches Ben and knocks him to the ground.

Ben looks up and sees Carla looking down at him. "Can you help me?" he asks, plaintively.

"Maybe," she says.

"I'm a cantor," he says. She thinks he is saying, "I'm a Cancer," that is, a Zodiac sign. She responds with her Zodiac sign. "I'm an Aquarius. We're opposites!"

Ben can't hold his liquor. He passes out. Carla takes out his wallet and discovers an address. She drives him to the address; it is the home he once inhabited with his now deceased wife, who has been dead for over a year. The home has a "FOR SALE" sign on the lawn.

Later, Ben walks into a Catholic church. The church is ornate. A priest is playing sacred music on an organ. The priest appears high or perhaps too spiritual for planet earth. This weird priest approaches Ben. The priest is fondling rosary beads in his hands in a way that Catholics do not do, but clearly this is a Jewish movie's lampooning of Catholicism. Ben asks the priest if he can convert to Catholicism in order to pray his deceased wife into Heaven. The priest informs Ben that it's the Mormons who do that kind of thing.

Ben is teaching adolescent boys and girls in preparation for their bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah ceremonies. Ben appears to be as bad at teaching as he is at dealing with his grief, performing as a cantor, interacting with his nagging mothers, and knowing how to behave in a bar. Ineffectual, shambling Ben is a lackluster teacher. He conveys absolutely nothing of the depth or wisdom of Judaism to his impressionable students who communicate painful boredom with their desperate eyes. As soon as the clock hits four p.m., one student raises her hand and announces that the class is over and that the students must leave.

Carla enters. She Googled Ben and his synagogue. They both realize that Carla had been Ben's eighth grade music teacher. Carla says that she has come to the class because she wants to become bat mitzvah, even though she is in her seventies. The bat mitzvah preparation and ceremony are intended for children embarking on adulthood.

Carla explains that she could not became a bat mitzvah because her parents were Communists. She was a red diaper baby. She says that she got her period on her thirteenth birthday, and menstruation is the worst part of being a woman. She had been a teacher for over forty years and was recently forced to retire. She is a widow. Carla appears to be recounting trauma from her early life. Ben, though, appears distracted.

Carla becomes frustrated. She demands that Ben do something that she had asked students to do back in grade school. She orders Ben to prove that he was listening to her by repeating back to her everything she just said. Ben haltingly begins. "You said that … "

Carla stops Ben. No, she explains, I want you to use the first person pronoun. In other words, she wants Ben to tell her story as she told it.

Ben does so. "When I was thirteen, I got my period, the worst part of being a woman," Ben says. Carla's face reveals that she is deeply moved by, and appreciative of, Ben's complying with her request. He had been listening to her, he proves, by repeating her confession verbatim.

Ben confesses that he has lost the ability to sing. Carla reminds him that, in grade school, she had taught him about belly breathing. She makes Ben lie down on a table. She presses her hands against his belly and encourages him to produce big sounds. He does.

Ben and Carla go out to a burger joint. They both enjoy their burgers. It is the first time in the film we have seen Ben enjoy anything.

What makes these burgers so good, Ben asks.

They put the cheese inside the patty, Carla explains.

Ben immediately spits out his food, openly, not by say, covering his hand with his mouth. He just splatters chewed-up burger.

These are not kosher, Ben protests. He must explain to Carla that consuming meat with dairy products is forbidden to observant Jews.

Ben's mothers have created a JDate profile for him. He meets with "Leah" (Pauline Chalamet). Leah says that she is not Jewish; she just can't stand how foreskin feels.

Ben visits Carla's house. She serves him tea that contains a hallucinogen. He hallucinates his adult self attending his own bar mitzvah. He sleeps at Carla's house and she sleeps on the floor next to him.

Gabby (Madeline Weinstein) is Rabbi Bruce's pretty young daughter. She appears to be in her twenties. She meets Ben at the cemetery where he has gone to visit his wife's grave. Ben and Gabby sit in the front seat of an SUV. Ben says that his deceased wife used to leave erotic messages for him on his voicemail and he has saved every message. Gabby demands that Ben give her his phone. He does so. Gabby listens to one of the erotic messages and speaks the words aloud to Ben. This particular message involves a fantasy in which a strange woman appears in Ben's bedroom and fellates him. Gabby orders Ben to unbuckle his belt. He does so and he also lowers his seat back. The scene cuts but the viewer assumes that Gabby fellates Ben.

Rabbi Bruce hosts a Holocaust Torah party and bake sale. With this title for an event, the film lampoons one tragic and one sacred feature of Jewish life. Rabbi Bruce's wife attends; she has long, dyed blonde hair, she wears low cut blouses and gold jewelry, she's had excessive plastic surgery, and she looks grotesque. Judith, Ben's Filipina convert adoptive lesbian mother, speaks passionately about Jewish identity.

Ben sleeps over at Carla's house. He wears her adult son's pajamas. Nat (Matthew Shear), Carla's adult son, arrives with his wife and children. He is horrified to see Ben in his pajamas. Carla, Ben, Nat, his wife and their children go out to eat at a restaurant named The Chained Duck, a reference to a French satirical weekly. Nat, the son of an Irish father and a mother who, he insists, was not Jewish because her Communist, atheist mother was not Jewish, is very hostile to Ben. Having one Jewish grandfather does not make Nat Jewish, Nat says. Nat insists that he is not antisemitic; rather he is a devout atheist. Nat thinks that the bat mitzvah idea is ridiculous. Nat browbeats his mother, who cowers before him. Nat tells Ben that he should leave, and Ben does leave the restaurant.

Meira, Ben's biological mother, is preparing a brisket. Rabbi Bruce and his wife arrive. Gabby, Rabbi Bruce's daughter, is also with them. Meira, Judith, Rabbi Bruce and wife, Gabby, Ben, and Carla share a sabbath dinner. Ben suggests a game of telephone. He whispers a message to the person next to him. After the game's completion, Ben blurts out that he is in love with Carla. Gabby, who had previously performed fellatio on Ben as they were parked next to his wife's grave, begins both laughing and crying. Carla appears angry. Judith, Ben's Filipina mother, seethes.

The film concludes with Ben and Carla by themselves, performing an abridged bat mitzvah ceremony in her backyard.

I wanted to see Between the Temples because it had received such positive reviews and because I am interested in concepts of Jewish identity. I'm not Jewish but one of my longest friendships, lasting nineteen years, was with Rabbi Laurie Skopitz, who died prematurely in 2006. My beloved friend was a rabbi in upstate New York. How could I not see Between the Temples?

As the above excerpted reviews show, Temples is a love-it-or-hate-it movie. Critics largely loved it; audiences not so much. But there's more than that that complicates my report of my own reaction. I watched many YouTube videos in which director and co-writer Nathan Silver and cast members Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane talk about the film. Clearly, this was a passion project. Nobody thought that they were going to make a million bucks from a low-budget depiction of a schlubby cantor's grief in upstate New York in winter.

How can I bash a passion project from such sincere artists and apparently nice people? I've done my duty. I've reported that many well-paid, prestigious critics have praised Temples. Me? I did laugh several times. I did find isolated scenes poignant and well acted. In the end, though, I think Temples is a failed film.

Three different very attractive women, who appear to be in their twenties, throw themselves at a dumpy loser in his forties. Gabby has just met Ben and yet seduces him in an SUV next to his wife's grave and performs unreciprocated fellatio on him. I have been walking past the Lodzer Jewish cemetery on McBride Avenue in Paterson, New Jersey for the past twenty years and I have yet to see any similar event.

Look, in real life, these women, one of whom is a plastic surgeon, no doubt bringing down a hefty income, are not throwing themselves at immature, emotionally crippled fat guys living in their mothers' basement. Why, then, does Silver depict this? Because he has a fantasy idea of women in general, or Jewish women in particular. There's been too much discussion adequately to cover here as to whether or not Philip Roth, Woody Allen, and even Nobel-Prize-Winning Isaac Bashevis Singer promoted misogynist and yes antisemitic images of women in general and Jewish women in particular. Without wading into decades of Sturm und Drang, I can simply say that Temple's female characters didn't work for me.

Temple's young, model-pretty women are desperate, demanding nymphos. Its older women aren't much better. Judith, a lesbian Filipina convert to Judaism, appears to be a spoof on Jewish men choosing to marry Filipinas; see here. Judith is an unpleasant person. She's manipulative toward and angry at Ben. She appears fake in her speech at the Holocaust Torah bake sale. Her wife, Meira, is unable to perform a mother's essential duty, that is, kicking her son out of the nest once he reaches adulthood. Rabbi Bruce's wife is a grotesque.

Carla is of course the heart of the film. She is meant to be the joyous life force that resurrects Ben. Or is she? Madeline Weinstein admits in an online interview that in one version of this largely improvised film's conclusion, Ben does not confess his love for Carla. I found the Sabbath dinner confession of love totally unsatisfying. Nothing that occurred so far in the film brought me to that moment. I didn't see Ben change significantly. I didn't see Carla change him.

The film lost me in the scene at the Chained Duck restaurant. Nat, Carla's son, who has one Jewish grandfather, is clearly antisemitic. He insults Carla and forces Ben to leave. Carla had previously shown herself to be a very bold woman. She picks Ben, a complete stranger, up at a bar, takes him home, makes him lie down on a table, and presses her hands into his abdomen. She orders him to repeat her words about her first menstrual period verbatim. She makes a man say, "I got my period." Suddenly, at the Chained Duck, she is a different character, silent and submissive. I stopped believing in the movie during that scene. Exploration of human character is why we pay money to see small films. Silver seems not to know his own characters.

Men in their forties are not going around falling in love with women in their seventies. There are very good hormonal, biological, and Darwinian reasons for that. In rare cases, this may happen, but nothing in Temples communicated to me that Ben and Carla were that rare case where lightning strikes in the oddest way and human nature is overturned and a love transcendent of the body's predictable journey through time triumphs. Further, why would Carla fall in love with Ben? Again, Ben is trapped in depression and passivity. I can see a woman wanting to mother this man, or pity him from afar, but fall in love with him? Why? Movies are capable of magic. They can make us invest in the impossible – an extraterrestrial riding a bicycle across the moon or petite Daisy Ridley mastering a light saber and beating up Darth Vader's heir. Temples never even tries to make us believe that Ben loves Carla, never mind that she loves him back.

Temples doesn't like non-Jews. The Aryan bully in the bar who punches Ben to the ground, the Jdate phony, Leah, who craves a Jewish man because she can't stand foreskin, are stereotypes, there for stereotypical encounters. The scene in the Catholic church offended me. I don't think that Christophobia is "better" than antisemitism. The scene didn't even do the work of being funny. It just depicted Catholics like me as, again, fantasies. Priests don't sit in church all day playing the organ. They have punishing schedules of public work – visiting the sick, saying mass, study. We do not fondle rosary beads the way that Demi Moore fondled her pottery. And, yes, I was also offended by the rabbi putting a golf ball into a shofar. There are plenty of people out there who desecrate shofars and rosary beads and they are evil. We should not imitate the kind of people who turned Jewish gravestones into pavement, or who defecate in Christian churches in Bethlehem, Kosovo, and Iraq.

If a Martian who had no other knowledge of human culture was shown a series of Woody Allen movies, he would develop an idea of Jewish manhood similar to that in Temples. This movie forces one to ask, Why would a Jewish director, screenwriter, and a Jewish actor create a character like Ben Gottlieb? The movie wants us to believe that losing his wife crippled Ben. The movie is lying. More than a year after his wife's death, Ben can't leave his mothers' basement and he can't do his job. A mature man in such a state would recognize that his problem is not normal grief and he would take action. Attend a grief group, see a therapist, "act as if" and get on with his life, knowing that life will eventually do to him what life does to those of us who grieve – it will give him new purpose. Ben could work on becoming a better teacher who makes four thousand years of Jewish heritage come alive for his students. At the very least, Ben needs to bathe, groom himself, and get some decent clothes. Judaism demands no less; see 2 Samuel 12:20.

But, but, professional critics insist that Temples is a Rosetta Stone of Jewish identity. In her interview with Evelyn Frick of the "she/they" pronouns, Madeline Weinstein, who plays Gabby, says that "I did not have a bat mitzvah. I was and still have a skeptic streak in me and am kind of anti-traditionalist. I grew up with a pretty secular Upper West Side Jewish family … 'Why do I have to get bat mitzvahed?' I think I really just didn't want to have to memorize the Torah portion … I've always felt very connected to a legacy of Jewish labor leftist organizing. My grandparents were activists, and my grandfather was a real Bernie Sanders type. So that has always been a way that I've very much understood my own and my family's Jewish identity too." Weinstein supports If Not Now, "a movement of American Jews organizing our community to end U.S. support for Israel's apartheid."

Temple's star, Jason Schwartzman, is a nepo baby. His mother is Talia Shire, an Academy-Award-nominated Italian American from a Catholic family. His uncle is Francis Ford Coppola and Nick Cage is his cousin. A 2009 Heeb interview characterizes Schwartzman's understanding of his own identity as "Zen." "I ask if he considers himself Jewish and he takes a deep breath. 'I am everything. I am everything and nothing all at the same time,' he says. 'I'm proud to be Jewish, but, yeah, I just consider myself everything. I'm just lucky to be here.' His enlightened, zen-like understanding of his identity makes me take a breath, too."

Nathan Silver, Temple's director and co-writer, says, "My mother was a red diaper baby and grew up in a socialist household, so religion was never really her thing. She was culturally Jewish: Jewish humor and these things were important to her, but I didn’t really go to temple as a kid."

Yes, being a secular Jew is a thing. No, secular Jews aren't necessarily any better qualified to get to the essence of the lives of observant Jews than any other creator. Silver has created a lead character, Ben, so observant that he splatters his face and surroundings with a spat-out burger when he discovers that it is not kosher. Carla is so hungry for a connection to Jewishness that she, in her seventies, embarks on becoming a bat mitzvah, or daughter of the commandments. Silver and his cast could have shown a bit more humility and gotten closer to observant Jews in order to depict them with more accuracy, and fewer cliches. Even more importantly, they could have immersed themselves in the Judaism their secular lives cheated them of.

I'm a Polish- and Slovak- descent cradle Catholic from New Jersey. Rabbi Laurie Skopitz was a devout rabbi, working in Rochester. We kept in touch for nineteen years. Rabbi Laurie was loving, funny, supportive, and vitally alive. In every aspect of his person, in his every interaction with me, in every conversation, he was completely Jewish. His Jewishness wasn't about public piety, empty ritual, or divorce from the wider world. Four thousand years of heritage informed his jokes, his care, his service. His sincere identity did not interfere with his connection with the wider world. One night I was in Berkeley California. I had recently returned from working in Nepal. Rabbi Skopitz was in Rochester. He began to sing a Jewish song to me. Chills ran down my spine because at that moment, my radio, playing in the background, was broadcasting a piece of music called a 'Tibetan bell shofar fusion." I didn't get the sense from Temples that the film's creators, as sincere and as nice as they are, even know that men like Rabbi Skopitz exist. They do. I'd love to see a film that limns the beautiful, very Jewish, soul of a man like Rabbi Skopitz.

Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.