In Review: 'Between the Temples,' 'Strange Darling'

Catching up with a pair of smaller releases we missed, this week's reviews include an extraordinary comedy and an innovative grindhouse throwback.

Between the Temples
Dir. Nathan Silver
111 min.

“Do you cry a lot?” a new acquaintance asks Ben (Jason Schwartzman) early in Between the Temples. Though we don’t see him shed tears until much later, Ben has the sort of face that prompts the question. He shares a house with his mother Meira (Caroline Aaron) and stepmother Judith (Dolly de Leon) but it’s more of a retreat than home. Just over a year after the death of his wife, Ben is taking his first steps back into the world and his career as a cantor at his small, upstate New York town’s temple. But, after attempting a comeback, he can’t bring himself to sing and spends the night wandering through town, making a (maybe) insincere attempt at suicide then throwing himself into other self-destructive acts, like picking a fight with a bully at a bar. 

It’s after the latter that he looks up and sees a face he’ll only recognize later, Carla (Carol Kane), his childhood music teacher. She patches him up and makes sure he gets home (after first using the address on his driver’s license, which takes him  to the house he shared with his wife) and then disappears, seemingly never to be seen again. Then, unexpectedly, he sees her again when she joins the kids in the b'nai mitzvah class he teaches, hoping to arrange for the bat mitzvah she never had. It’s not exactly conventional, but soon Ben’s life will start veering from convention in even more dramatic ways.

A meaningful messiness—both in the way it’s made and the relationships it depicts—drives Between the Temples, directed by Nathan Silver, from a script co-written by Silver and C. Mason Wells. It’s a film locked into the unpredictability that’s overtaken Ben’s life since (and maybe before) he became a widower. The sometimes frenetic editing matches the equally in-the-mix camerawork by Sean Price Williams (an indie veteran of films by the Safdies and Alex Ross Perry) and both suit a story that moves from one unexpected moment to another. Part screwball throwback, part Harold and Maude homage, it’s at once wild and thoughtful, as deeply invested in Ben and Carla’s search for happiness as in exploring how their religious community both aids and limits that happiness. Early on, Ben watches his rabbi and boss Bruce (Robert Smigel) practicing his putting using a shofar as a target. It’s not, Rabbi Bruce tells him, a kosher shofar. It’s a funny punchline and one that keeps with a film interested in exploring what is and is not kosher, literally and otherwise.

Where Silver brings a thrilling sense of instability to the filmmaking, the cast keeps it grounded and moving. Aaron, Smigel, de Leon (who’s quietly having an amazing year between this film and Ghostlight), and Madeline Weinstein (as Rabbi Bruce’s daughter and possible love interest for Ben) give terrific ensemble support to Schwartzman and Kane, who play Ben and Carla as characters just as confused by what’s happening as those around them. Between the Temples offers less of a chance for the pair to depart from the sort of characters they usually play than really get a chance to explore them. Schwartzman’s been the melancholic and Kane the daffy eccentric many times before, but rarely have either gotten the chance to explore versions of those characters with this much depth and soul and at such length. The moments when Between the Temples slows down to let Ben and Carla connect (particularly an early conversation best left unspoiled), when both look in each other’s eyes and put everything aside apart from their attempts to understand one another, when the chaos of their lives falls away, make a breathless film suddenly, unexpectedly breathtaking. —Keith Phipps

Between the Temples is currently in limited release.

Strange Darling
Dir. JT Mollner
96 min.

Had he been invited to the party, JT Mollner could have submitted Strange Darling to the Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez project Grindhouse without changing a thing, save for dragging the 35mm print across a gravel pit and inserting some jarring splices. There’s a wink-wink, nudge-nudge quality to the film, which starts with a deadpan reading (by Jason Patric!) of the opening crawl about a real serial killer and continues with a bloodied woman running in slow motion through a field to a country cover (feat. Keith Carradine!) of “Love Hurts,” as the titles pop on the screen in red block letters. It may take place in the 21st century, but the tone is more evocative of The Last House on the Left and other cheap ‘70s horror films that have an eerie verisimilitude, despite Mollner (and cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi!) operating in disturbingly vibrant colors. It’s a nasty piece of retro art trash. 

Though stripped down to only a small handful of characters and sequences of high tension, Strange Darling engages in a structural gamesmanship that masks a couple of potent twists and reframes “past” scenes in a new light. Mollner has written “a thriller in six chapters,” but those chapters play out in nonlinear fashion. From the opening crawl, we learn that we’re about to see the final crimes of a serial murderer play out in the Oregon backwoods and sure enough, as we immediately jump ahead to Chapter 3, the bloodied young woman from the credits, referred to as “The Lady” (Willa Fitzgerald), is engaged in a high-speed chase with a relentless pursuer, referred to as “The Demon” (Kyle Gallner). Earlier chapters reveal the two have a history, pivoting from some serious rough trade in a motel room. 

To say more would be to trample on the revelations that Mollner springs with devilish élan, though it’s worth noting that Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey turn up as a couple of retired mountain hippies who work on a Scott Baio jigsaw puzzle together. (They’re likely unaware of Baio’s current role as a top political thinker.) But the push-and-pull between The Lady and The Demon in the motel room, where they’re trying to come to terms on an extreme bit of sexual role play, sets Strange Darling on edge, all while emphasizing the vulnerability inherent in the hook-up, even when it doesn’t involve handcuffs and safe words. At a certain point, Mollner has all of his cards on the table, despite the persistent rearrangement of the chapters, and Strange Darling turns into more of a cat-and-mouse game, staged for maximum visceral punch. It’s the sort of drive-in feature that leaves little time for necking. — Scott Tobias  

Strange Darling is currently in limited release.