After enduring an openly anti-Semitic museum exhibition last week, it was a relief to see Between The Temples, a proud and loving Jewish film from director Nathan Silver. However, I don’t want to be like my late parents and simply knee-jerk any Cultural product that features Jewish characters or themes. Between the Temples is basically a July-November mumblecore romance, set partly in a School. As far as Jewish content goes, it’s not “shit.” But at least it honors its mother and father, so to speak, and doesn’t reject Jewish tradition outright. We’re still here, it says, we’re still worth talking about, and we still get Bar Mitzvahs.

Our hero is Ben, a cantor in his forties, played with great Schwartzman-ness by Jason Schwartzman. Ben has “lost his voice,” which is a nice conceit, except that the real problem is that he’s grieving for his late wife, an alcoholic novelist who died in a stupid accident. This is a typical New Yorker subscriber problem that the film never really portrays convincingly, although Ben’s sadness is palpable. He lives in the basement of the house his mother shares with her current wife, a Filipina convert to Judaism, played by Dolly DeLeon, last seen messing people up in the Oscar-nominated Triangle of Sadness. The irony is that DeLeon’s character is much more of a yenta as Ben’s real mother (Caroline Aaron), who seems to love him for who he is and not for who she would like him to be.

BETWEEN THE TEMPLES ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Led by: Nathan Silver
Written by: Nathan Silver, C. Mason Wells
With: Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Dolly DeLeon, Robert Smigel, Caroline Aaron, Madeline Weinstein
Duration: 111 mins

The film’s potential Oscar nomination comes in the form of the remarkable Carol Kane, who plays a character named “Carla Kessler,” a frustrated Laura Nyro who eventually became Ben’s middle school music teacher. Carla is herself widowed but part Jewish, and she decides to celebrate a bat mitzvah in her old age. Being Carol Kane, she is both mad and wise. Kane gives Carla a remarkable range of touching twitches and quirks. Her late-career performance recalls that of Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude, a film that Between The Temples more than partially resembles. Their flesh and milk mingle, and love is in the air.

Between The Temples’ problem isn’t in the acting, which is excellent and includes a witty appearance by Robert Smigel, the voice of Triumph The Insult Comic Dog, as a golf-loving rabbi ethically compromised in the most innocuous way possible, and an odd but believable second-act performance by Madeline Weinstein as Smigel’s troubled daughter. But the film is a stylistic mess. Director Silver seems to think he’s John Cassavettes reincarnated. His camera doesn’t stay still, moving jerkily around the action and focusing on the actors’ faces for endlessly annoying and pretentious close-ups. Scenes blur and time frames become unclear, but then other conversations seem to go on forever. A visit from Carla’s adult son and his family happens out of nowhere and then drags on for far too many minutes without a satisfactory resolution.

At its core, Between The Temples is a comedy about adult relationships in the style of James L. Brooks or Nancy Meyers, but in Silver’s hands it feels more like Uncut Gems, without the potential for crime melodrama. He’s much more like the Duplass brothers than the Safdie brothers. His film works best when someone puts clamps on him and prevents him from moving the camera for a while. It’s no coincidence that the best scene is the final scene, when the camera finally comes to rest and shows us our two protagonists in one long, still shot. They are finally themselves, and so are we.

This is the most Jewish film of the year in a year that desperately needs Jewish films. As far as Jewish films go, it is no Annie Hall, Fiddler on the Roof, Yentl, Crossing Delancey or The Twelve Chairs. But my parents and their yenta Friends who have never seen a Jewish film they couldn’t see would have loved it. In times like these, that’s confirmation enough for me.