TEMPLE MINDS

In Valley theaters this weekend:

Between the Temples--A cantor who can't sing sounds like the set-up for a joke. Fate has, indeed, played a pretty nasty one on the hero of this wistful, stinging comedy about grief. Ben (Jason Schwartzman) is the sad-sack cantor of a modest synagogue in small-town upstate New York. A year after an appalling freak tragedy, the devastated fellow can't find his voice.

His Rabbi boss (Robert Smigel) refuses to fire him, possibly in part because Ben's two moms (Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon), with whom he lives, are generous donors to the temple. But all that anybody can think to do to help him is push him to re-marry; the Rabbi's avid daughter (Madeline Weinstein) is a prime candidate.  

Enter, or rather re-enter, Ben's grade school music teacher Carla O'Connor (Carol Kane), who used to be Carla Kessler before she was married. Long widowed in her seventies, Carla would like the Bat Mitzvah she never got when she was young. Reluctantly at first, Ben begins to give her instruction, and gradually they bond.

It's no secret that Carol Kane has been a treasure since the '70s, playing ethereal if often hapless waifs in films ranging from Hester Street to Wedding in White to When a Stranger Calls to The Last Detail to Annie Hall. She made her pixie persona legitimately creepy in The Mafu Cage and she gave a riotous self-parody in Scrooged. Her magic hasn't deserted her in Between the Temples; even though she's playing a believable, realistic character she retains a touch of the otherwordly angelic.

Schwartzman is no slouch either. In probably his most vivid role since his tour de force debut in Rushmore, he gets across the terrible confusions and wrongheaded impulses into which bereavement can lead a person, the way one can rebel against one's own best interests if the alternative is acceptance of an unacceptable loss.

I loved these performances and these characters. I loved the direction by Nathan Silver, from a script he wrote with C. Mason Wells, and the grainy, washed-out, '70s-movie-looking cinematography of Sean Prince Williams (this film seems to share a '70s-cinema aesthetic with last year's The Holdovers). But following the psychology of its central character, Between the Temples does spin out of control toward the end, into a deeply uncomfortable climactic scene and an unsatisfying, incomplete-feeling finale. It's a gem, frustratingly flawed.

There can be little doubt, however, that the Bat and Bar Mitzvah is a potent subject, especially when sought by an older person. In 1997, Ira Wohl's too-little-known documentary Best Man; "Best Boy" and All of Us Twenty Years Later concerned Wohl helping arrange a belated Bar Mitzvah for his developmentally disabled cousin, who was then in his seventies. Then in the 2000s, a late friend of mine had a second Bar Mitzvah when he reached the age of 83.

Carla's rather urgent aspiration in Between the Temples reminded me of all this; sometimes, perhaps, you can't see the value of a rite of passage until after the passage has already been made.