Between the Temples (2024 | USA | 112 minutes | Nathan Silver)

This manic movie about a shlubby cantor who finds himself still unable to sing (Jason Schwartzman) a year after the death of his wife aims to capture how it feels like to be driven mad by family, religion, and grief. If so, mazel!

In it, he somewhat inexplicably finds himself volunteering to prepare his zany old music teacher (Carol Kane) for her adult bat mitzvah. The tutoring effort finds him straying from his studies at the temple, distancing himself from family, and crashing in her loft after long study sessions. It’s a reprieve from his everyday aimlessness, a save space for two lonely people to share their mourning, yet it nevertheless raises eyebrows. His Rabbi wonders why this random woman is on the late-life fast track to conversion (a hint that she’s be a big donor removes objections); her son wonders what this fortysomething is doing in his old pajamas.

Schwartzman and Kane play to type — he’s near comatose in a perpetual haze of sustained mourning and too-frequent mudslides at his local dive. She’s a daffy whirlwind of kindly misplaced optimism and occasional non-sequiturs. Following his novelist wife’s untilmey demise he’s living in the basement of his two mothers (Caroline Aaron as a painter, Dolly De Leon as a go-get-em real estate agent). They’re oppressively loving and perpetually meddlesome, constantly setting him up with women far out of his league. The degree to which they take interest suggests some element of wish fulfillment fantasy.

With grainy filmmaking and naturalistic performances, the rough-around-the-edges vibe evokes a classic Sundance aesthetic of yesteryear, either in tribute to an era or by necessity. Everyone looks like they did their own hair and makeup; the sets look borrowed from someone who lived there. The story jumps all over the place in mood and tone. To an extent this may be intentional as it contribute to the sense by which processing grief is rarely linear. It all culminates in a chaotic dinner sequence that gives the skin-crawling anxiety of Shiva Baby a run for its money in terms of operatic discomfort of close quarters. There’s plenty to appreciate here, namely the performances of its strong cast and the off-kilter way that everything progresses. But much like the rushed conversion, the whole thing felt like it could’ve used a little more time to cook.

Between the Temples played as an official selection of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It is available for online viewing from January 25-28.
Header image courtesy of Sundance Institute. | Photo by Sean Price Williams.