BETWEEN THE TEMPLES (2024)

Mystifyingly well-reviewed character study from indie filmmaker Nathan Silver lost whatever appeal it may have had after the early buzz cleared.  Seen plain, this soggy mid-life crisis story fails on nearly every level.  Forty-something Jewish Cantor Jason Schwartzman has recently lost his wife and then his voice.  Feeling useless, his two Moms (birth mother and religious convert Latin spouse) are eager to help get him back on his feet, setting him up with dates & psychologists.  Sometimes in one & the same package.  But the only comfort he finds is when he meets-cute with seventy-something gadfly Carol Kane, his former music teacher.  (She doesn’t recognize the boy he was, but then, Schwartzman has recently packed on about thirty pounds, you might not recognize him.)  Maybe this odd couple can help each other: she’ll give him voice lessons/he’ll help her with her fondest wish, getting the bat mitzvah she never had.  Meantime, he’s started dating the Rabbi’s daughter who joins him near his late wife’s grave where they listen to old erotic phone messages he’s saved from his wife.  Less gross than it sounds, a talented comic director might mine squeamishly uncomfortable sub-Philip Roth fun from it.  Alas, Silver anything but a great comic director, egging on his cast to overplay (Kane’s ditz all but unwatchable, especially when stuffing burgers in her mouth), unable to stage or pace comic action or dialogue.  Even these problems might be forgivable if Silver would occasionally put the camera in the right place . . . and leave it there.  Usually it's way too close.  And when he does pull back, the composition goes dead.  So too the film.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For a funny/touching late-in-life bar mitzvah, try this gem from the old DICK VAN DYKE show where staff writer Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) become a man.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m54VraF-1PM

CONTEST:  The congregation looks to be what might be called Jewish Conservative Lite which makes nonsense of a late ‘reveal’ in Kane’s character.  Name the unlikely plot twist to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of the streamable movie of your choice.