An early draft of this review was originally published on September 3, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
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Here’s a movie I was certain I would love:
- The trailer got my attention.
- The early buzz praised two actors I have deep affection for.
- It shows no sign of having been crafted for crowd-pleasing or any last-minute revisions due to audience reactions.
- The obvious filmic reference points are all features I either cherish or greatly respect.
I mean, wouldn’t you want to see a movie that was pitched as “A blend of Harold and Maude, Punch-Drunk Love, Lars and the Real Girl, The Big Sick, and A Serious Man, served with some unnerving Shiva Baby sauce and a dusting of The Graduate”?
But alas… very little of Between the Temples worked for me.
The setup is interesting enough: Ben (Jason Schwartzman) is a 30-something widower fractured by the sudden death of his wife, and (like Punch-drunk Love’s Barry) troubled by what appears to have been a life among overbearing women. In his grief and insecurity, he’s lost his voice. Literally: he cannot sing the required ceremonies and services at his local synagogue. He seems stuck in a state of arrested development, unable to navigate, wary of opening himself to new experiences or relationships.
But one day, his childhood music teacher Carla (Carol Kane) appears out of the blue, and he reconnects with a formative influence from happier times — a teacher he respected, a grown woman who may have inspired something like a boy’s first crush. (I’m speculating about that, but I think the film suggests it.) And when Carla decides to show up as an unlikely student in his classes on bat mitzvah preparation, their student/teacher experience is flipped, and it brings them onto strange, new, and equal footing in which they now interact as peers, as friends, and, perhaps… even more? Both Ben’s and Carla’s families and friends are perplexed by his fixation on this new companion (like Lars’s community is perplexed in Lars and the Real Girl). He certainly seems more comfortable with, excited by, and interested in Carla than in any of the young, single women his mothers and Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel) are lining up as candidates (just as Kumail’s family parades eligible prospects in front of him in The Big Sick).
As we slowly collect the clues and confessions to understand why Ben is so devastated, we have no trouble believing that he would suffer a crisis of faith and be “disabled” — perhaps permanently — when it comes to relationships.
His trauma is multi-faceted: It’s not just that he lost his wife the way he did. It’s the way she treated him — dominating and manipulating him. And it’s the fact that he’s grown up with his mother Meira (Caroline Aaron), and his stepmother Judith (Dolly de Leon) who rarely agree on what’s best for him. He’s become a tangle of nerves and insecurities and confusion. Everybody wants to solve him like a problem. It seems he hasn’t found a safe space within which he can figure himself out yet, much yet figure out what he wants… or who he wants.
Schwartzman has become one of my favorite actors in his work with Anderson. Come to think of it, the first time I ever saw him was in Rushmore, a film in which he’s got a crush on one of his high school teachers. But Rushmore understood that an adolescent boy’s pursuit of his adult teacher is a symptom of immaturity and ill-advised fantasy. Not so here.
If I’m supposed to see Ben’s relationship with Carla as a mutually encouraging friendship that gives them both a safe place to be themselves and grow, I’m all for that. Carla takes him back to a pre-trauma time in his life when he was a boy full of potential. And she pays attention to him in a way nobody else does: with tenderness, with good humor, showing that he offers things she values even as she can help him. But I keep getting the feeling that the movie wants me to hope for a full-blown romance between Ben and Carla, and that means I cringe when I should be caring.
What’s more, I find Ben himself distractingly difficult to read. As Schwartzman plays him, Ben veers between adult anguish and a boyish playfulness, as if he’s reverting to being a child because grownup hardships have proven too much for him. He’s confused, sure—but he’s also confusing. Am I supposed to find his fitfulness funny? That’s difficult when he’s attempting suicide. Am I supposed to be grieving for his loss? That’s difficult when the hints we get about the nature of his marriage are alarming.
As Carla, Kane is radiant, complex, and often a joy here. Has she ever had such a substantial role before? I’d be delighted to see her get some awards attention for this.
Nevertheless, Carla, too, remains a mystery to me. Why is she drawn to Ben? At times the film hints that it might be a sexual attraction, but most of the time it doesn’t. At times it suggests that she’s afraid of the recurring strokes she is suffering, and that this relationship gives her a path of living in denial rather than investigating the causes of her illness. At times it suggests that he’s giving her a second chance to be a mother, and as her relationship with her existing son is less than ideal, perhaps that’s how we’re to read this.
Whatever the case, the movie seems to be teasing us with the idea of a romance, but in its last act, Carla seems perplexed to realize that Ben is thinking of her in this way, and then the question of whether or not they’re headed toward some kind of consummation is abandoned entirely.
Director Nathan Silver and his co-writer C. Mason Wells choreograph a climactic dinner event as epic in its extreme awkwardness as anything in Shiva Baby, and while I think I’m supposed to be laughing at the escalating chaos, it’s hard to find much of it funny when there’s also an escalation of harm: everyone at the table seems likely to hurt someone else, if not everyone else, before it’s over.
Gabby (Madeline Weinstein), the young woman who is pursuing Ben is suffering; her family so eager to see her find a match is suffering; Ben’s moms are suffering. And while I think we’re supposed to see this scene as Ben’s lunge toward a path of salvation, I experience it as Ben’s dismaying surrender to a fantasy. I think I’m supposed to want him and Carla to be together forever in some kind of Harold and Maude “rebellious lovers” mode, thumbing their noses at the restrictive and manipulative system. And the system—that is, this controlling community—seems to deserve that!
But Harold and Maude makes me believe in and root for them; they’re a match that seems strange and taboo until you consider how much stranger and more dehumanizing the world around them has become. Between the Temples aims for something similar. But instead I just feel sorry for these two. I want them both to go to serious therapy.
What a discombobulating picture.