Between the Temples

Establishing shot, slow zoom into close-up. That’s the more standard way a film camera moves. Between the Temples opens with the opposite: in extreme close-up on Jason Schwartzman’s face, then slowly pulling back to reveal the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is the dining room table, where Schwartzman’s character, Ben Gottlieb, is listening to his two moms stage what he thinks is a grief intervention. A middle-aged Jewish cantor still mourning his late wife, Ben has lost his singing voice, and his bearings. But the intervention, turns out, is actually the first of many first-date setups. Utterly befuddled, just trying to make sense of the situation, Ben nods politely at the woman, who is catching on that he didn’t agree to this date. (Still, she’s game to go out: “I put on the pants and the hoops,” she explains, pricelessly.) The whole first scene moves at a bopping, bizarro tempo: discombobulating for Ben and audience both, but a perfectly calibrated way to pace-set Nathan Silver’s atypical, terrific relationship comedy.

Soon, Ben’s stupor is upset by a chance encounter with his elementary school music teacher, Carla (Kane). She still speaks like a teacher of young children (“get your tushie on there,” she coaxes him at one point), but becomes herself the student, planning her bat mitzvah even though she’s in her 70s. The friendship – even soul connection – this unlikely duo forges is so weird and wonderful, with Schwartzman and Kane delivering dynamo performances all the more daring for their unshowiness, a word that could apply to the whole movie. Shot wanly on film in wintertime, Between the Temples takes a while to reveal its depths – its linguistic wit (Silver co-wrote the script with C. Mason Wells), its cockeyed humor and compassion, how it can modulate from deadpan-slapstick to achingly poignant and still feel authentic in both keys. I suspect where the plot goes will be polarizing; I’m not sure they landed the plane was my first thought when the credits rolled. But days later, Between the Temples has stuck with me. On the zoom out, I think it’s simply marvelous.