Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The problem with being a great character actor is that you get taken for granted: it sometimes requires a jolt for people to realise just how good you are and how long you have been around. Nathan Silver’s comedy Between the Temples provides just such a salutary jolt for Carol Kane, a fixture in American cinema ever since her Oscar-nominated lead in Joan Micklin Silver’s 1975 Jewish period piece Hester Street. On television, she has chalked up series from Taxi to Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to Batman spin-off Gotham, playing that juiciest of roles, the Penguin’s mother.Then there’s Jason Schwartzman, who was the precocious would-be genius Max Fischer in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore — in Between the Temples, now in his mid-forties, he is hitting his character prime. Kane and Schwartzman are a dream duo that had to happen.Schwartzman plays Ben Gottlieb, a synagogue cantor who has lost his will to live following his wife’s death. Drunk and despairing in a bar, he is rescued by Carla O’Connor (Kane), his old music teacher, who recognises him as “Little Benny” from school. To his surprise, she walks into the class Ben teaches and announces that she wants to study for her bat mitzvah (the female equivalent of the bar mitzvah), despite being six decades older than the standard 12 years.While his mother (Caroline Aaron) and her partner (Dolly de Leon) steer him towards dates, Ben is increasingly drawn to Carla; we, and those around him, are uncertain how appropriately. In fact, it is usually other people, rather than Carla and Ben, who act with agonising inappropriateness — like Carla’s son Nat (Matthew Shear), suspicious and confrontational from the off. In one mesmerisingly awkward scene, the local rabbi’s daughter (Madeline Weinstein, pricelessly nervy) gets turned on by Ben’s archive of sex messages from his late wife. The film culminates in a Friday night dinner crackling with discomfort and overlapping dialogue, and edited in a frenzied ping-pong of close-ups.Some of the in-jokes are specifically Jewish — like the rabbi casually doing a bit of in-office golf practice using a shofar, the ceremonial ram’s horn. But this is also a somewhat ecumenical comedy, as in Ben’s relishably poker-faced meaning-of-life conversation with a Catholic priest.Silver and co-writer C Mason Wells provide some cracking lines, but overall we get something of an improvisational feel from the terrific ensemble cast — certainly between Kane and Schwartzman, whose comic duo rhythm is like loose Jewish jazz. Schwartzman is very affecting as a perplexed, tragicomic galoot and Kane is a marvel. Her Carla is a broad-brush eccentric but ever unpredictable, her voice oscillating between Betty Boop delicacy and raging foghorn: challenged on being too old to take bat mitzvah, her Carla responds with icy emphasis: “Should I play bingo? Or mah-jong?”Silver allows his collaborators dizzy free rein: notably in John Magary’s distinctively kinetic editing and in the photography by indie cinema luminary Sean Price Williams, whose rough-edged camerawork echoes the freewheeling feel of 1970s American comedy at its best.★★★★☆In UK and US cinemas from August 23
