“Between the Temples” — Acting Up as Spiritual Searching?
In Between the Temples, a widower cantor, fortyish Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman), who is too depressed to sing, reconnects with his widowed seventyish elementary school music teacher, Carla Kessler O’Connor (Carol Kane) who helped him find his voice as a child.
After his voice fails him at a Friday night service (a recurring sign of his mourning?), the cantor runs away from the synagogue, plops himself down in the middle of the street hoping to get run over, is dropped off at a bar by a semi-truck driver (who, we assume, pitied him and helped him), and meets his former teacher who valiantly rushes to his rescue after he is decked by a bar bully. A strange chain of events for a Sabbath’s night.
Soon thereafter, Carla visits Ben’s bar/bat mitzvah class with the hope of studying for an adult bat mitzvah. She tells him that her Communist parents were indifferent to her having a bat mitzvah ceremony in her early teens, that the local temple barred her for unspecified reasons, and that her non-Jewish husband would have been opposed. Ben, in a funk of sadness, wants to refuse her request, but she swiftly and deftly pressures him into agreeing.
The film begins as a somewhat gentle critique of American Jewish life—office shofar-golf by a frustrated rabbi, an off color parody of J-Date’s vulnerabilities. Then it mocks specific examples of bad taste in the synagogue—most notably, the rabbi’s willingness to compromise for possible membership fees, a situation enabled by Ben’s religiously observant major-donor mothers, especially his convert stepmother; and crass fund-raising to procure a Holocaust Torah, in which the stepmother plays a key role.
But this film takes bad taste where few Jewish-themed movies have gone before. It suggests that the traditions and infractions, the religious institutions and the instances of bad taste, are interesting only to the extent that they get Jews to act up and to act out—a people chosen, as it were, to let out their emotions, whether fleeting or lingering, in order to show others how to relieve sadness and resentments in the most capricious ways. Filmmaker Nate Silver and writing partner C. Marion Wells may well have outdone David E. Kelley, whose selected Jewish characters behaved similarly on TV series Chicago Hope and Picket Fences.
In this film, the purpose of halachah or religious law is to prod Jews to act up, usually with food as a trigger, whether eating a non-kosher hamburger or sharing a Shabbat dinner.
Such an agenda belies the film’s claims to depicting a quirky relationship born of spiritual searching. The filmmakers demonstrate at every turn of plot, camera angle and shock effect that spiritual searching is not the issue here
Is Ben a sad sack victim of loss, or is his seeming helplessness rooted in resentment of his late wife’s success as a novelist, while his moms’ donations and the rabbi’s acquiescence keep him in a job he does not want? His wife was an alcoholic who died of a drunken fall. The legacy to which he clings consists of the erotic voice mails she left him and of her unfinished novel about him. Does he go to see a priest because he worries about her afterlife or to hide from his own faith with the one-liner: “We don’t believe in heaven and hell but in Upstate New York”? Of course, belief in heaven and hell came to Christianity through Judaism.
Is Carla as honest and direct as the film would have us believe? Ben learns from her son, Nate, who is suspicious of their platonic relationship, that Carla’s mother was of Episcopalian background. Why does Carla withhold that fact, and why does Ben not speak to her about conversion? Is Nate intended to represent resentment of the law by those who know it, even if they were not raised Jewish? What is the meaning of Nate’s animus toward the very idea of his mother having a bat mitzvah ceremony and his clear annoyance with his wife and daughters for sympathizing with her desire? Is Carla, who is shy about doing karaoke in crowds, looking for another more controlled way to perform?
Is the rabbi’s daughter an innocent victim? Rabbi Bruce had tried to bring Ben and his (“mess”) daughter Gabby (Marion Weinstein) together, with the help of Ben’s moms. An aspiring actress, Gabby has been abandoned just before her wedding and, even worse, in her view, she has been bypassed at auditions for Jewish film roles by non-Jewish actresses. Yet she demonstrates little talent when she “acts,” except when she reads the sexy phone messages Ben has saved from his from his late wife, whom Gabby eerily resembles. She does these readings in order to seduce him in a car—at the cemetery where his wife is buried. Is she really a fan of Ben’s wife’s novels, as she has claimed? Her laugh at a “revelatory” Shabbat dinner, at which his remarks indicate that he will bypass her, indicates that she is very much a part of the cult glorifying acting up. Her cry is not one of pain but of exhilaration.
Are the filmmakers committed to the innocent searching that this film purports to represent? If Ben joins Carla at a non-kosher restaurant to savor the hamburgers, why have him act out at the (expected-in-a-general-restaurant) mixture of milk and meat? Is the scene intended to poke fun at just that one aspect of kashrut (the dietary laws)? Why must Ben entice the rabbi, with promises of a big donation, to shorten Carla’s period of study when Ben could have offered a perfectly legitimate request for shortening the period of study (which is, anyway, a Hebrew School requirement not intended for adults) by telling the truth that he is concerned about Carla’s health? Why have Carla advocate for an adult bat mitzvah by relating that Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism and the inventor of the modern bat mitzvah ceremony, performed the first ceremony (for his own daughter) in his home when it was in fact done in Kaplan’s Society for the Advancement of Judaism (“SAJ”) synagogue? Are the writers pushing for the removal of life cycle events from the synagogue?
Some critics gush that this film is about the cantor restoring his lost faith by instructing the teacher who wants to find a place in that faith. But the film is not interested in Jewish faith. Rather, it exults in Jews acting up. No one here mentions God or regards the Torah as Divine guidance to be joyfully, reverently and lovingly received.
Between the Temples is perhaps the first film to depict Jewish clergy with lesbian parents, but it is not kind to them, as parents or as people, especially to the convert to Judaism who at one point viciously accuses Carla of having “groomed” Ben since childhood. It certainly offers an unflattering characterization of the cantor whom the two moms have raised and seemingly foisted upon the temple community. In the end, Ben once more leaves the synagogue (and another unsuspecting bat mitzvah family) high and dry, displacing Carla because of his lack of responsibility and common sense and self-restraint at a Friday evening dinner. The only possibly lewd suggestion to Carla from Ben comes at the very end when she asks him what is done after the bat mitzvah ceremony. Does acting up in the face of traditions sanction entitlements?
While some critics regard this film as pointing to a mature shift in Ben’s faith through his relationship with Carla, it is nothing more or less than a green light to refitting and cherry picking religious traditions, norms and teachings in the name of acting up, disrupting responsibilities, and glorifying tastelessness.
