Availability: Showing widely in theaters; no streaming at this time. Best guess is that it will stream in December on Netflix (which has a deal with SONY). See JustWatch here for future streaming availability.
When Ben Met Carla
It takes a while. To get used to the extreme close-ups (some appear focused on the actor’s two moles on his cheek); the rapid, jumpy, disorienting cuts; the slow pace of revelation (there’s no simple set-up); the protagonist himself. Jason Schwartzman is 40-something Benjamin Gottlieb, a schlumpy cantor in a liberal synagogue who cannot perform the principal job requirement: singing. In good time we learn that Ben’s inability to sing is a manifestation of the profound depression he has been thrust into by the unexpected death of his wife a year earlier, a depression at times depicted humorously—he lies down on a city street and begs a big rig driver to run over him.
Right, Ben (Jason Schwartzman) and
Carla (Carol Kane) find themselves
sleeping in the same room when a
friend makes the "wrong tea" for them.
.
After some comical attempts by his Moms to get him dating again (his biological mother is now married to Judy, a Filipino convert to Judaism), Ben turns to that old stand-by, the bar. He’s so unfamiliar with the milieu that the bartender must select a cocktail for him. The Mudslide becomes Ben’s drink of choice. It’s after drinking too many that he picks a fight in the bar, gets knocked flat, and is “rescued” by a wide-eyed, perky blonde who introduces him to real alcohol. That wide-eyed, perky blonde is widowed 70-something Carla O’Connor (Carol Kane), who was “little Benny’s” music teacher in grade school.
The script is a slow burn too. Ben and Carla encounter each other more frequently when she decides to reclaim her Jewish heritage by having her bat mitzvah (maiden name, Kessler), and insists that Ben, an instructor of the young teens preparing for theirs, be her teacher. It’s a screenwriting turn that allows Carla to comfort Ben without appearing obviously therapeutic.
Mid-way through the story comes the classic dinner—at The Unchained Duck, with its enormous yellow menus—the funny before the storm.
As the encounters multiply (he stays the night at her house after drinking the “wrong tea” a friend made for them—a bit of over-determined screenwriting), the families weigh in. Mid-way through the story comes the classic dinner—at The Unchained Duck, with its enormous yellow menus—the funny before the storm. That’s the setting for Carla’s doctrinaire atheist son to declare his mother’s religious training absurd (“your grandfather was Jewish,” he yells at his mother and adds, pointing at Ben, who is wearing his mother’s pantsuit, “that doesn’t make you Jewish under his rules”). Someone has to leave.
Carol Kane, above, is delightful and Jason Schwartzman appropriately
schlumpy as they fully inhabit their characters--Carla and Ben.
The denouement unfolds at the opposite end of the religious spectrum, at another family dinner—Ben’s family at Shabbat. His biological Mom (Caroline Aaron) just wants “whatever makes you happy.” But Mom Judy (a feisty Dolly De Leon from 2022’s “Triangle of Sadness”), while not quite Jamie Lee Curtis in TV’s “The Bear,” is a stickler for Jewish details. And as such, she comes close to de-railing, and in the process exposing, a relationship the two protagonists barely understand. A game of “Telephone” ends badly.
Kane is a delight as the retired schoolteacher taking on new adventures, somehow both naïve and aware.
The story unspools gradually, with small surprises along the way and with equal doses of grief and joy, of drama and comedy—the main source of the last coming from Rabbi Bruce (SNL writer Robert Smigel), who putts into a shofar, cheats at golf, and never saw a donation he couldn’t accept. The two lead actors inhabit their roles fully. Schwartzman’s emotional coming out is deftly portrayed. Kane is a delight as the retired schoolteacher taking on new adventures, somehow both naïve and aware.
A Jewish “Harold and Maude” 53 years later—with less madcap and more subtlety.
Director and co-writer Nathan Silver, an Indy award-winner, Schwartzman (almost unrecognizable from his many Wes Anderson roles), and Kane have given us a Jewish “Harold and Maude” 53 years later—with less madcap and more subtlety. In a cinema world of big-budget franchises with their prequels and sequels and in-between-quels, it’s the independent films that offer the emotional valence we seek at the theater. Silver has hit a sweet spot.
She says: It took me a while, but once I warmed to it, I was enchanted.
He says: I warmed to it immediately, maybe because I married an older woman.
Date: 2024
Director: Nathan Silver
Starring: Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Dolly De Leon, Caroline Allen, Robert Smigel
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 111 minutes
Other Awards: 2 wins and 5 other nominations to date (including at the Sundance and Berlin International Film Festivals)
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