As a comedy, Nathan Silver’s chamber piece about two grieving people finding each other when they weren’t particularly looking for anyone gets off on misplaced expectations. In the opening scene, sullen Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman), a cantor who is taking a “sabbatical” from the upstate New York temple where he works, is told by his two mothers, Meira (Caroline Aaron) and Judith (Dolly De Leon), that they are about to receive a visit from a doctor, intelligence that Ben receives with a mixture of fear and curiosity. He knows his Jewish mothers (even if one was born in Manila and converted just prior to marrying the other) and believes they are trying to rope him into therapy because of his depressed mood of late, wondering if they aren’t right to do so, but when the doctor shows up and turns out to be a female plastic surgeon who the moms think might make a nice mate for their son, Ben initially misunderstands: Do his mothers want him to get a nose job?

One might think that Silver takes the joke too far, because Ben’s extended reaction is to walk out and lay down in the street in front of a truck, whose driver doesn’t grant his death wish. We eventually learn that Ben is still mourning his wife, an alcoholic novelist who died as the result of a drunken fall, and you get the feeling Silver would like nothing better than showing that accident in a humorous light, but, fortunately, he resists. Ben’s return to work also doesn’t go well. The temple’s rabbi, whom everybody calls Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel), has to take over the singing when Ben loses his voice right away and flees the building in humiliation. It’s easy for Rabbi Bruce to forgive Ben, and not because he’s a man of God, but because he’s constantly distracted by money and golf (which he cheats at), and Ben’s moms are major donors. The only thing that Ben can do to make himself useful is tutor children in Hebrew, mainly in preparation for their bar or bat mitzvahs, and one day the class is visited by an older woman (Carol Kane) whom Ben previously met at a bar and who saved him after he picked a fight with another customer. She turns out not be not a stranger but rather Mrs. O’Connor, Ben’s grade school music teacher, who wants to regain the Jewish heritage she never celebrated—her parents were card-carrying communists who abhorred religion and she married an Irish atheist—by having her own bat mitzvah, which is, to say the least, highly unusual for a woman her age. After some initial confusion, Ben agrees to prepare her and the two become an item of the sort that, at first, his mothers and Rabbi Bruce approve of, but once Ben’s true intentions emerge everybody wonders if he at last hasn’t gone off the deep end.

Though many of the comic set pieces are cringey in the worst way, there’s an inventiveness to the script’s acerbic take on social mores that recalls the 70s films of Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson, which means Silver isn’t afraid of resorting to psychedelic slapstick and childishly dirty dialogue. And while he takes full advantage of Kane’s image as a goofball, Carla Kessler O’Connor is clearly the deepest character in the movie, even deeper than Ben, whose pain is mostly a function of his immaturity. Carla’s is borne of being a woman who has always known her worth and was denied the chance to prove it by the people who supposedly loved her, including her dead husband. When her psychiatrist son curtly dismisses her desire to achieve some cultural grounding in Judaism, his love is revealed as being selfishly conditional, and yet she can’t help but love him back. That’s probably what attracts Ben to her, and if you want to call that a mommy complex—Jeez, doesn’t he already have enough mommies?—you can’t argue that Carla isn’t exactly what he needs. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

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