In Nathan Silver’s new film, “Between the Temples,” a fortysomething cantor, Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman), sits uncomfortably on the bimah of his synagogue, unable to sing a single note.
He’s been a cantor without a voice since the death of his wife sometime before. The distraught Ben finally rushes from the temple and, still wearing his kipah and tallit, lies down in the street and gestures for a truck to run him over. When the truck driver stops, the cantor tells him to “keep going, please.”
Rather, the trucker drives Ben to a nearby bar, where he gets drunk on Mudslides, is punched out by an obnoxious patron, and, while lying on the floor, sees an angelic face slowly come into focus. Turns out the woman is Carla Kessler (Carol Kane), a septuagenarian Ben realizes was his music teacher in grammar school. When Kessler learns that Ben is a cantor, she insists that the reluctant clergyman give her lessons toward her bat mitzvah, which she never had as a child growing up with Communist parents.
With her upbeat, no-nonsense attitude, it is Carla — also recently widowed — who drags Ben out of his funk, inspiring him to reconnect with the world while he leads her to connect with her Judaism.
“Over the past 15 years, Silver, 41, has emerged as a chronicler of the uncomfortably intimate and as an auteur who is unafraid of emotional and narrative complexity,” film critic A.J. Goldmann writes in his New York Times story on Silver.
“Between the Temples,” his ninth feature film, earned good reviews after screening at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.
A self-described neurotic, Silver, who lives in Brooklyn, was affable, with an infectious laugh during a recent Zoom interview. Bearded and bespectacled, his conversation is punctuated with references to films and filmmakers that have influenced his work, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Robert Bresson, Mike Leigh and Luis Bunuel — especially the latter’s classic short film, “Un Chien Andalou” (“Andalusian Dog”), which Silver’s father, an avid cinephile, showed Nathan when he was around 8.
“It haunted me,” Silver says. “The scene with the razor blade through the eye — I couldn’t shake that image.”
Silver grew up in a secular, cultural Jewish home in Arlington, Mass., which, he says, was “very much an Irish-Catholic, hockey-playing town” where he was the only Jew at school. “I was an outlier,” he says. “My parents were New York Jews who found themselves in Massachusetts for my dad’s job, and I definitely felt out of place. So, we clung to our New York Jewish sensibility.”
For Silver, that meant, in part, a love of Jewish humor, including the work of Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld. But while his family celebrated Chanukkah and held Passover seders, Silver says he has only stepped foot in a synagogue several times in his life. He has, however, cast his Jewish mother, Cindy Silver, in many of his highly improvised independent films, including a role in his 2012 picture, “Exit Elena.”
“I just love the way she tells stories,” the filmmaker says of his mother. “She goes on all these digressions, and by the end of the story, you feel like you’ve read or listened to a Dostoyevsky novel. And she brings in so many different colorful characters. So, I really wanted to see her do that version of herself onscreen. I suggested she should write something down. She never did that, so I had her do it in my films.”
With the help of his Jewish consultants, Silver created a volatile Shabbat sequence that also drew from some of the anxiety-producing family meals he remembered from when he was young.
“Growing up in a household where over the dinner table you laugh, you cry — it was just a whole array of emotions,” Silver recalls. “Whenever we would have holiday meals, it was always just a lot of commotion … and a lot of tension, followed by sweetness, followed by what you didn’t know what to expect. And so I always wanted to capture that sense of anxiety and love in my films, because I associate that so much with my family, both my mother and father and beyond.”
“Between the Temples” began when the filmmaker ran into producer Adam Kersh at the after-party for Silver’s movie, “The Great Pretender,” in 2018. Silver told Kersh, now a producer on “Between the Temples,” about how he had cut his mother’s character out of one of his recent films. “She was completely offended,” Silver says, “and then she just wouldn’t let it go. It lasted for, like, a year of her being angry with me. So, I wanted to make it up to her.”
The result was Silver’s documentary series, “Cutting My Mother,” in which viewers learn that Cindy is studying toward a possible bat mitzvah.
“I related this to Adam, and he said, ‘Oh, there’s a movie there.’ And then he’s like, ‘What if you did, like, a Harold and Maude riff,” Silver says, referring to the quirky 1971 cult classic about a May-December romance.
Even though Silver didn’t immediately see his way into the story, “Adam kept pestering me; he’s this wonderful pest,” the director recalls. Silver went on to engage screenwriter Chris Wells to be his co-writer. They called their Jewish consultants about 15 times a day for input, Silver says.
The director also brought some of his mother’s experiences to the fictional Carla. Similar to Cindy Silver, the character had been a red diaper baby, raised without religion, who seeks out a bat mitzvah later in life. Both had aspired to become dancers, but married and had children young, giving up their artistic ambitions to raise their families.
Silver once said that the world is a joke and we’re the punchline. “I meant that life is absurd,” he explains. “It’s so hard to make sense of any of it, and I feel like we’re the butt of this joke. But I think that outlook is from some time ago. Maybe I’ve softened a bit, and maybe we’re both the joke and the punchline. We’re the humor of life in the end. We’re the absurdity.”
He sees “Between the Temples” as more optimistic than his previous films. “I think I want to see more heart onscreen than I suppose I did in the past,” he says. “I mean, I’ve always wanted to do justice to my characters’ places in life. But I feel like now, I don’t know, I got married [in 2022], and I feel like coming out of COVID, I don’t want to attack everything from my cynical angle. I suppose whereas when I was younger that was ingrained in my brain somehow.
“It’s also trying to be hopeful in this very despairing time just in terms that everything just seems to be going to s— in terms of the environment and obviously politics … and also the film industry. So, you feel everything falling apart around you, and I’m trying to have faith that there has to be some hope. In order to feel that, I guess I want to see that in my movies, in the stories I tell.”
“Between the Temples” opens in theaters on Aug. 23.