‘Between the Temples’ Review: A Widower Walks Into a Bar

Ben Gottlieb — the touchingly soulful hero of the soulful, delightfully tetchy “Between the Temples” — is a mess. He needs a haircut and a shave; he could do with better-fitting clothes. He’s having problems at work. He also lives in his family’s basement, that much-derided refuge of the eternal man-child and terminal loser. Yet because the filmmaker Nathan Silver has an appreciation for life’s ironies and likes putting a topspin on his comedy, Ben lives with both his mother and stepmother. He lives, in other words, in his mothers’ basement.

Ben — a perfect Jason Schwartzman — is a sad sack, but he’s also just sad and for a very good, excruciating reason, too. His wife died not long ago, leaving him bereft and, increasingly, without an evident sense of self or purpose. He seems to have lost his bearings, but he’s also lost his singing voice, which proves a problem given that he’s the cantor at a local synagogue. He still teaches there, working out of a cramped, shambolic classroom in which he helps boys and girls prepare for their bar and bat mitzvahs, the traditional Jewish coming-of-age ceremonies that formally announce the passage from childhood to adulthood.

Set in the present in an upstate New York hamlet, this coming-of-middle-age story follows Ben during an eventful time in his life, which takes a turn after he runs into his former elementary-school music teacher, Carla Kessler O’Connor (Carol Kane, divine). They reconnect in a bar, where she helps the soused, deflated Ben, a kindness that takes an unexpected turn when she shows up at the synagogue. Carla wants to take his class, explaining that she never had a bat mitzvah. Ben is reluctant because, well, she isn’t a child, but after consulting with his boss, Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel), Ben relents. A friendship blossoms and perhaps something deeper does, too, and the movie gets its blissfully offbeat groove on.

Silver, who wrote the movie with C. Mason Wells, introduces Ben without preamble, immediately dropping you into a conversation that started before the movie did. Ben and his mothers, Meira and Judith (the nicely synced Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon), are in the family’s dining room having an apparently serious heart-to-heart. Judith says they think he “needs to start seeing a doctor,” a suggestion that Ben says he’s open to. As the camera zooms out, Ben keeps talking only to be cut off by the doorbell. The moms jump up, and a pretty female doctor enters and almost immediately begins hitting on Ben, a shift that abruptly gives new meaning to the advice the moms have just voiced.

With the doctor’s entrance, the movie turns straightaway from the plaintive to the humorous. The scene is characteristic of how Silver changes up the tone and mood, creating an unexpected pacing that’s complemented by Sean Price Williams’s agitated cinematography and the jumpy rhythms of John Magary’s editing. The movie is laced with absurd setups, slapstick and some silly props, all of which converge in a scene at a restaurant called the Chained Duck (the name of a satirical French newspaper). There, Ben and Carla have dinner with her belligerent son, Nat (Matthew Shear), a hostility that Silver slyly deflates when the waiter hands everyone menus as large as battleground shields.

The outlandish menus undercut the son’s disproportionate, clenched-jaw anger at Carla without draining the scene of its tense realism or turning the son into the butt of the joke. Silver is a sharp, cleareyed observer of human nature, and while he pokes at his characters, including Ben, it’s more teasing than cruel. If there’s a mean joke in “Between the Temples,” I missed it, which helps explain where Silver is coming from. He and Schwartzman make Ben’s pain palpable without sentimentalizing it; you see the hurt in the sag of Ben’s shoulders and in the melancholy that clouds his eyes. Yet there’s a fundamental resilience to the character who, while he’s sometimes off on his own, is never really alone.