How many mothers does a man need? The Dresser asks this question after meditating over Nathan Silver’s film Between the Temples.
In this comedy cum drama, a cantor loses his ability—or certainly, his will—to sing after his wife dies. He is such a mess of grief; he moves back into his mother’s basement. His artist mom Meira (Catherine Aaron) has a wife named Judith (Dolly De Leon) whom Cantor Ben (Jason Schwartzman) also calls Mom, and these two women are prominent contributors to the synagogue where he is employed. This means that Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel) will not fire him. Ben attempts to perform and when he cannot, he flees on foot to a highway where he lies down in the road and expects a massive truck to run over him. However, the horrified truck driver stops and then takes him to a local bar. There, the bartender keeps filling him up with a chocolate drink called a mudslinger. Think of the bar tender as a pun because Ben has regressed to an age that precedes his bar mitzvah, the Jewish coming of age ceremony for a boy which involves reading the Torah.
At the bar, he encounters Carla Kessler O’Connor, his grade school music teacher (Carol Kane). While he struggles to escape her, she becomes the only one who can bring him back to his full manhood. Voila, he finds his third or fourth mother, if we count his deceased wife who left him a legacy of dirty talk through her phone messages to him.
Carla decides that she wants a bat mitzvah, the equivalent coming of age ceremony for Jewish girls, to make up for the lack imposed by her parents. For she was a red diaper baby, a child brought up without religion by Jewish communists. Indeed, Carol Kane in her baby-fied Goldie Hahn-like voice made the Dresser believe Carla’s need to rectify this childhood deprivation. Ben says no he can’t teach her, but she says, yes, you can and so does Rabbi Bruce.
Meanwhile, everyone pitches in to matchmake. His moms introduce him to a woman who, at first, they suggest is a shrink. She is a doctor but a cosmetic surgeon. Unbeknownst, to Ben, Mom Judith then signs him up for a JDate and so an eager woman named Leah in a very short skirt blocks the entrance to his temple. Rabbi Bruce sends his beautiful daughter Gabby who, though suffering from a recent heartbreak, musters the energy to summon the voice of his late spouse and put into action a sexual act suggested by the wife’s dirty talk. Happily, the director spares us from an immersive scene.
However, it is only the belly rub to encourage deep breathing by Carla that moves the cantor. After that, he invites himself to her house to show her his bar mitzvah video which happens to be the same Torah portion she is studying for her bat mitzvah. Pretty soon he becomes an uninvited overnight guest (with no access to Carla’s boudoir) sleeping in the pajamas of Carla’s adult son Nate. Nate and his family show up that next morning and encounter Ben. Nate, a psychiatrist, is aghast at seeing Ben attired in Nate’s intimate wear and demands a meeting with his mother to talk things over.
It's this one-scene-that-leads-to-the-next from crisis to crisis that keeps the film in a state of happy chaos. It’s much like what a new mother experiences in having a baby. In this case, Ben is the helpless baby. You might say in retrospect that what happens in this film was very funny, but first you must get through the grief and confusion to experience that belly laugh. It’s a mind game, as suggested by the film’s title.