Review: Between the Temples (2024)
It may be an exaggeration to proclaim that the Jews created contemporary American humor. Still, much less enduring hilarity would have ensued over the last seven decades without the likes of Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, The Coen Brothers, or Nichols and May. Despite such a pedigree, Jewish comedy has also remained resolutely secular—all punchlines involving sitting shiva delivered with a palpable ironic detachment or the type of transgressive bluster that made Philip Roth the country’s preeminent American novelist for anyone over 40.
So, that a movie like Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples would become the toast of Sundance in 2024 seems decidedly out of step with both our current moment and the comedic legacy on which it stands. A wry dramedy about a cantor (Jason Schwartzman) serving at an upstate New York synagogue who learns to live again after the death of his wife when his septuagenarian elementary school music teacher (Carol Kane) decides she wants a late-life bat mitzvah, Silver’s film parts with the counterculture Hollywood classics like The Graduate and Harold and Maude that directly inspired it by directly grappling with the faith. Not since the Coens’ A Serious Man in 2009 has a film so steeped in the minutiae of Judaism encroached into the world of the indie movie. But unlike the film that marked the Coens’ most personal and affecting effort, Between the Temples isn’t a period throwback. It’s a movie that resolutely makes a case for the relevance of the faith in the Northeast’s Blue milieu.
At every beat, Silver’s film threatens to succumb to the schmaltz that has ruined so many twee indies in the age of streaming. But a decade of making micro budget features firmly outside the Hollywood ecosystem has given his work a confident DIY resonance that conforms to hipster rom-com convention only to subvert it. Best known for her roles in the classic sitcom Taxi and, more recently, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Kane turns in an astounding empathetic portrait of an aging hippie everyone else dismisses as yet another old coot. Though the film is set mostly in living rooms and beige offices, Silver’s collaboration with Sean Price Williams allows the cinematographer’s trademark invasive closeups to make the affair both observational and intimate—a feat that shows why Williams’s directorial debut, The Sweet East, and music video work with Sabrina Carpenter are revitalizing stale genres.
Between the Temples is neither an anthropological exercise nor a conversion narrative. It’s a deliberately messy interrogation of belief and the hunger for something beyond ourselves that proves the comedic legacy of the chosen people is on more than firm footing.
Between the Temples is now playing in theaters.