Nathan Silver on Between the Temples
Nathan Silver has long been one of the most exciting voices of American indie cinema but his fiercely intelligent films have not received the wide recognition they deserve. His fantastic ninth feature, Between the Temples, should change that
At awards ceremonies, filmmakers’ acceptance speeches will often include a loving thank you to their parents. Should the electric dramedy Between the Temples prove an indie heavyweight come awards season, director Nathan Silver will have more reason than most to highlight his mother: she inspired the entire project.
“She'd been in a lot of my films and I cut her out of one and she wouldn't forgive me,” Silver tells me of his mum, Cindy Silver. “So, in order to make it up to her, I made a documentary series about her [titled Cutting My Mother], and while shooting it, I learned that she was going to get her Bat Mitzvah. She was taking B'nai Mitzvah lessons when she was 65. I was shocked because I had no idea. She'd grown up in this socialist household and religion was never her thing. I relayed the story to a friend, [producer] Adam Kersh, and he said, ‘You need to make some version of this where a character like your mother is getting her Bat Mitzvah and falls in love with either the cantor or the rabbi. You make a riff on Harold and Maude.’”
Silver and co-writer C. Mason Wells – the latter of whom apparently dislikes Harold and Maude – went with a depressed, recently widowed cantor in upstate New York: Ben (Jason Schwartzman), who’s undergoing a crisis of faith when his grade school music teacher, Carla (Carol Kane), re-enters his life as his new adult Bat Mitzvah student. As Ben and Carla secretly form a curious bond, Ben’s two mothers (Caroline Aaron and Triangle of Sadness scene-stealer Dolly De Leon) try getting Ben back on the dating scene, with Gabby (Madeline Weinstein), the daughter of the local rabbi (Robert Smigel), being the only woman to get close to a connection.
Silver’s previous independent features (Exit Elena and Uncertain Terms among them) are full of excellent performances, something Between the Temples continues with particularly gorgeous turns from Schwartzman, Kane and Weinstein. And the new film is notably the director’s first to feature big American movie stars – excluding Anjelica Huston’s narration for 2017’s Thirst Street. “It was written for Jason,” Silver tells me, “and we couldn't see anyone else playing the part. Luckily, my good friend, [French actor] Damien Bonnard, had worked with him on Wes Anderson's Asteroid City. Damien put in a good word. He had this whole spiel that I think helped [Jason] actually read [the script].”
The character of Carla wasn’t written with a specific performer in mind. Luckily, an answer for the casting eventually came to Silver via the novel coronavirus. “During a fever dream [when] I had COVID, Carol Kane popped into my head,” says Silver. “Duh. She was always right there but we were looking past her. Luckily, she’d been wanting to work with Jason since she'd seen Rushmore. When we got them together on Zoom for our initial meeting, I could see a movie with those two faces and the way they already had this immediate rapport. I can't imagine the [film] without these two actors. They are the movie.”
Kane apparently had some trepidations about some of the film's improvisatory aspects (“the fact that she wouldn't see the actual scripted pages until closer to the shoot”), but there’s no trace of those worries in the completed film. And the living legend still has one of the great smiles of American cinema, her wide grin being one of this movie’s secret weapons. “It bursts through the screen,” agrees Silver. “You have that vulnerability and sensitivity that she brings to the character, which is necessary, along with her screwball energy.”
Kane’s breakthrough role, for which she received an Oscar nomination, was in Hester Street (1975), in which she plays a Russian-Jewish immigrant struggling to assimilate in 19th-century New York. That film’s director, Joan Micklin Silver (Between the Lines, Crossing Delancey), is one of two late artists to whom Between the Temples is dedicated, the other being David Berman, founder of the band Silver Jews.
“[She] looms large in my brain,” says Silver of his fellow Silver (no relation). “She brought such warmth and intelligence to romantic comedies, with this humanist bent that really moves me. David Berman's music we listened to obsessively while writing it, thinking of him as a person as a model for Ben's character.”
Elsewhere, the quick energy of filmmakers like François Truffaut and Arnaud Desplechin inspired abrupt, idiosyncratic touches in the 16mm cinematography (by The Sweet East director Sean Price Williams) and editing (by John Magary): “[Sean and John] embrace that playfulness where the unpredictability of the characters is matched by the unpredictability of what might happen within a given scene. It’s key to making it fun to actually make the movie, but also fun when you're watching it, because you never quite know what you're in for.”
Between the Temples has its UK premiere at EIFF, 16-18 Aug, various venues
Between the Temples is released across the UK from 23 Aug by Sony