Nathan Silver’s “Between the Temples” is a wild and personal comedy that works the opposite way from most farces, which are typically predicated on precision. Each joke drives a traditional farce forward, while Silver’s film has a shagginess that suggests character studies of the 1970s, especially those directed by Hal Ashby and Paul Mazursky. Or, more specifically: Imagine if an atypically gentle Philip Roth wrote Ashby’s “Harold and Maude” and you’re close to the spirit here.
A handful of sharp opening scenes introduce us to Ben (Jason Schwartzman) and his plight. The first shot is a close-up of his face, looking resigned, befuddled. Schwartzman plays these emotions with a casualness that’s funny and very poignant. He is a marvelous actor I suspect that we take a bit of for granted, due to that aforementioned casualness, which can be mistaken for effortlessness.
Many actors would overdue Ben’s schlubby qualities, but Schwartzman plays Ben as having grown accustomed to his own unhappiness, like one might an old robe. His unhappiness in a weird way is companionable, the sort of realistic contradiction that cinema in the late 1960s and ‘70s could be so adept at getting across.
Ben’s mother, Meira (Caroline Aaron) and her wife, Judith (Dolly De Leon)—Ben just calls them both his “mothers”, which is also poignant—are not accustomed to his unhappiness. They say that he should maybe see a shrink and he is vaguely amendable and, well, good to hear that honey, because here’s a shrink ringing our doorbell right now who’s also an attractive young woman that you may wish to have a drink with.
“Between the Temples” is rich in silly little inventive episodes like this, which spin clichés in friendly and revealing new directions. The film is very Jewish in sensibility, and Meira and Judith suggest empathetic modernizations of the stereotype of the meddling Jewish mother. They are warm, lovely people who care about their middle-aged son who is clearly in a depressive freefall, and they are trying to do the right thing without smothering him. Silver and his co-writer, C. Mason Wells, are able to parody their love for Ben without trivializing it or going sentimental.
Ben tries to commit suicide, insincerely, by throwing himself in front of a tractor trailer that’s still a hundred feet away. Jokes about suicide that are neither too cute nor too maudlin or melancholy—how very “Harold and Maude.” That said, I’ve always found “Harold and Maude” to be overpraised. Its ghoulishness, its sentimental celebration of outsiders, is somehow self-consciously cloying.
Why does Silver get away with a similar sensibility? Besides the actors, who are extraordinary from top to bottom, it could be the sheer speed at which “Between the Temples” moves. John Magary’s editing gives the film a sharp, subliminal intensity. Images whisk by, as characters collide together while talking up a storm. Their internal thoughts are revealed to us, verbally and visually, and these thoughts are sometimes played as tragedy, as comedy, or both. Late in the film, as Ben rushes through his upper-state New York neighborhood, he races by an image of his deceased wife on a porch smoking in her sunglasses. It’s a startling expression of his grief, blink and you miss it.
A year after the death of his wife, an alcoholic writer who drank herself into an accident, Ben is still reeling. He is the cantor at his synagogue and he can’t sing. Good thing that Meira and Judith are large donors, which the rabbi (Robert Smigel) acknowledges with the sort of comic understatement that is this film’s stock in trade. Downing mudslides at a local bar, Ben runs into his former music teacher, Carla (Carol Kane), who eventually asks Ben to help her prepare for her bat mitzvah several decades after the usual age of 13. They are oddballs, feeling detached from their ecosystems, and they click.
It has been a long time since Kane has had a role like Carla, a role that takes her considerable range seriously and allows her to fly. In the late 1970s and ‘80s, her high voice and diminutive frame were often used for obvious comedy in movies and TV, comedy which she plays superbly, but it was partially a waste of her talent. Silver seems to remember Kane’s sensual cameo in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” in which she radiated an erotic current that Hollywood barely bothered to acknowledge.
Schwartzman and Kane, two cinematic hipsters from different generations, together in an unconventional romantic comedy—the result could’ve been insufferably twee and high-concept, but these two are magical together. They, and Silver, are poets of an unusual kind of earnest irony. They are vulnerable and funny and so in sync that the script doesn’t need to do handstands selling their chemistry to you, even when Ben is tempted by a younger woman, the rabbi’s daughter, Gabby (Madeleine Weinstein) who, in a morbid-kinky touch, looks exactly like Ben’s dead wife (also played by Weinstein).
Silver has been making films for about 20 years now—intimate comic dramas with a homemade feel that typically play in art-houses in New York City. His last few films, particularly “Thirst Street,” hinted at the extravagant humanism and formal beauty that “Between the Temples” achieves. A film this idiosyncratic, original and human managing to get booked in theaters across the country is a sign of hope.
JT Mollner’s “Strange Darling” is pretty damn idiosyncratic itself, and, like “Between the Temples,” it calls back to a past tradition of cinema, in its case the blood-drenched, cheeky, structurally tricky crime film typically known as the post-Tarantino noir. That was a thing in the back half of the 1990s, in the wake of “Pulp Fiction,” and most of them were embarrassing. “Strange Darling” is a little too clever for its own good, but it’s far from embarrassing—it’s a nasty little shot of genre rotgut for the end of the summer.
The film is split into chapters and told out of chronological order—so far, so “Pulp Fiction”—in the service of springing a twist that, if I may be self-satisfied, I saw coming immediately. But the hopscotch nature of the narrative gives the film tension. You never know when a scene is going to be broken up for a flash backward or forward.
Early on, a man, referred to in the credits as the Demon (Kyle Gallner), is in pursuit of a woman billed as the Lady (Willa Fitzgerald). Given that we see the man chasing the women in a truck, while brandishing a gun, it’s safe to say their relationship is contentious. But it didn’t start out that way. Early in the film, chronologically, they are seen talking sultry in his truck outside a motel in the middle of the night. This conversation, in which the Lady alludes to the danger that women risk when considering one-night stands, inhibiting them even though they are just as horny as men, is unusually ambitious and empathetic for a gory midnight movie.
They move into the motel, and a long sequence involving what is theoretically a pre-coital roleplay is easily the heart and the high point of “Strange Darling.” Leaning into her fears, and into her most reductive feelings of men, Lady asks Demon to handcuff her and strangle her. It becomes ambiguous how much of this is planned and how much of this represents either Lady or Demon adlibbing to possibly abusive ends, and I don’t see a need to ruin the surprise. The tension is real and disturbing and erotic and very ably tethered to #MeToo anxieties. In this stretch, the film is reminiscent of the also quite able roleplay-thriller “Sanctuary” from a few years back.
The driving mystery of “Strange Darling” is the relationship between the interlude in the motel and the chase that kicks off the film. While you ponder said mystery, Mollner springs a buffet of stylish carnage. The film has a feverish, pseudo-Technicolor sheen—courtesy of actor turned cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi—that is lurid and gorgeous.
Is “Strange Darling” saying something novel about contemporary gender tensions, or is it ultimately utilizing topical fears for the sake of sprucing up a tricky retro thriller? It’s the latter, and I can live with that. This is a modern movie as pulp paperback, like this year’s also enjoyable “The Last Stop at Yuma County.” Only meaner.
“Between the Temples” and “Strange Darling” are playing in theaters everywhere.
