“Between the Temples”

I don’t have one positive thing to say about “Between the Temples,” one of the worst films not only to come out of the Sundance Film Festival this year, but one of the most disastrous films I have seen in a long time. From its lackluster screenplay to borderline incompetent directing, this is a complete fiasco.

Cantor Ben (Jason Schwartzman) is having a crisis of faith, and his life is about to get more interesting when his grade school music teacher Carla (Carol Kane) comes back into his life as his new adult bat mitzvah student. It sounds like a terrific premise for a film, but director Nathan Silver executes everything so poorly that he completely squanders the could’ve-been-fun narrative.

The film probably will resonate more with the Jewish community than the average moviegoer, as the humor and tone is geared almost totally to that very specific culture. The story is not universal at all, with uninteresting characters and too-specific humor that’s either horribly unfunny or even worse, milked so much that it becomes exasperating (case in point: mudslides).

The mechanics behind the camera are grossly amateurish. The editing looks as if it was done by a 3-year-old with the world’s shortest attention span, and the quality of the filmmaking is irritating (and actually nauseating). The cinematography is terrible too, with a retro look that adds absolutely nothing to the already weak story.

Don’t get fooled into thinking that this is a good film because of the talented cast. It’s a cinematic crime to waste Kane and Schwartzman in this way, but they do their best with the garbage material they’ve been given. Nothing can save “Between the Temples.”

By: Louisa Moore