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.

CRATER LOVE HATH NO MAN

Opening in theaters today:

Asteroid City--In Golden Age of Television black and white, a stentorian TV host (Bryan Cranston) tells us that we're about to see a documentary about the writing and staging of a new play. The drama in question is titled Asteroid City, and it's set in a tiny desert community near the impact crater from an ancient meteorite. It's the Cold War mid-'50s in this, Wes Anderson's latest; mushroom clouds blossom in the distance from the occasional nuclear bomb test.

Soon we shift to color, and to a stylized milieu that looks like Midcentury travel-poster art of the southwest. A large roster of characters assembles in Asteroid City, many of them for the convention of the Junior Stargazers, an organization of youthful science prodigies and inventors.

At the center of this ensemble, insofar as it has a center, is a bereaved young photographer (Jason Schwartzman) who hasn't yet broken the news to his kids that their mother has passed on; he's one cabin over from a movie star (Scarlett Johansson) with whom he bonds, as do his son and her daughter. Along with these familial tensions, the gathering sees military intrigues, scientific experiments, quarantine and even alien close encounters.

I really wish I liked this movie better than I did. Anderson is a one-of-a-kind comedic artist, and his 1998 Rushmore is one of my favorite films of the last thirty years. His debut feature Bottle Rocket is a gem as well. Most of his subsequent films have been brilliant but uneven; the best of them, like The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, have been flawed near-masterpieces, dazzlingly imagined and acted but marred by heavy-handed touches of sour violence and labored narrative conceits.

All of this is regrettably at work in Asteroid City. It has a beautiful look, the title setting is beguiling, there are patches of funny dialogue (by Anderson and Roman Coppola) and strong visual gags. The cast is without peer for current Hollywood prestige, glamour and chops. The star power is almost too abundant to name; check the poster above for the listing. It's the sort of bunch that only Woody Allen used to be able to command. But all of this, alas, falls short of overcoming Anderson's misguided habits.

Most ruinous is the frame story, about the play. It looks great, but it distances us from the main story while adding no perspective on it that I could see, is of minimal amusement in itself, and diffuses the later part of the picture into hazy anticlimax. But even within the Asteroid City story, Anderson strikes a curiously flat tone. Deadpan is a wonderful comic technique, unless everybody's deadpan, and then it just becomes monotonous.

A couple of the actors, like Liev Schreiber, Tilda Swinton, Hope Davis and Steve Carrell, manage to escape the Jack Webb Sound-Alike Contest and texture their performances a bit. And Tom Hanks, as Schwartzman's dour father-in-law, somehow finds a tone that's fully in keeping with the movie's style but also seems entirely naturalistic. Hanks seems to be indestructible.