The early ’90s brought viewers an unusual one-two punch from Sidney Lumet—unusual because the veteran filmmaker only managed to knock himself out. A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993) are the pictures in question, the former starring Melanie Griffith and the latter her then-husband, Don Johnson. That I recognize each as a dud does nothing to lessen my affinity for them, especially A Stranger Among Us, which bravely asks and answers the question: “What if we remade Witness with Hasidic Jews and cast Eric Thal as Kelly McGillis… and it sucked?”
Griffith plays Emily Eden, a flirty NYPD detective who jokes of her cowboy reputation that she’s Calamity Jane. (Our first hint that this was a questionable undertaking came in the form of its original title: Close to Eden.) Stranger opens with Emily and her partner Nick (Jamey Sheridan, adrift in a role that’s more conceit than character) reminiscing about both their first collar and their on-again, off-again relationship. “Cha-cha all night and then straight to the courthouse in the morning,” she recalls, before spotting a couple of sleazy perps she wants to take down without backup.
“See those two?” she asks. “Just like my stool pigeon told me. It’s going down.” These laughable attempts at hardboiled dialogue—the first of many—are somehow made adorable by Griffith, whose signature combination of touching vulnerability and winking defiance are in fine tune despite the absurdity of the material. “I hate this rogue shit,” Nick complains to her shortly before he’s brutally stabbed. While he recovers in the hospital, Emily catches her next case: the killing of a young man from a Hasidic community.
That’s how she meets Ariel (Thal, thoroughly unremarkable), a friend of the deceased whose head is always in a book—often a pocket-size copy of the Kabbalah that’s stashed within religious tomes like a comic book in an algebra text. “You shouldn’t learn Kabbalah. Mysticism can shorten your life,” he’s warned to no avail; he excitedly shares teachings like “God counts the tears of women” with listeners who don’t understand. His sister Leah (Mia Sara), who inexplicably speaks in a heavy accent he lacks, later tells Emily that he was a Talmudic genius from early childhood. “He is to Jewish learning what Mozart was to music,” she explains. “Ariel can look down at the sky.”
His purity of heart and powers of perception make him an excellent, if entirely inappropriate, match for Emily, whose deductive reasoning skills enchant him. The adopted son of the rebbe (Lee Richardson), Ariel knows his destiny is to eventually succeed him as the religious leader of their community. Emily, who doesn’t know a rebbe from Rebbie Jackson, hardly ingratiates herself to the Hasidim when she suspects the murderer is one of their own. “I know human nature,” she tells the rebbe, who answers “You will pardon me, but you do not know our nature.” Nor is she familiar with mezuzahs, Jewish mourning customs or how to keep kosher.
Wondering why Leah must be present during her interactions with Ariel, she asks him “Are you planning on jumping my bones?” After he patiently answers questions about payes, she shrugs and says “Yeah, well, whatever.” She repeatedly tests his personal and religious boundaries, unaware they’re inextricably linked. “Go ahead, cheat a little. I won’t tell,” she says when he declines a non-kosher chocolate. “What, you never break the rules?” she presses when he doesn’t respond. The score (oy vey, the score!) turns somewhat seductive. There are a million little Saturday Night Live-esque moments like that in the film that never fail to delight me.
Prior to embedding herself in the rebbe’s household, Emily is warned “Listen to me, very carefully. While you are with us, you must respect our customs.” In time she (mostly) does just that, unintentionally drawing laughter from yours truly when she observes a family sitting shiva and earnestly tells Leah, “You people, you really care about each other.” But before that can happen, the normally restrained Ariel must lecture her in an uncharacteristic flash of anger, “Detective Eden, I want you to know something. We are not quaint or exotic. We are not cute little characters.” Incorrigible even in her modest new clothes and hair, Emily teasingly replies that he is cute.
The filmmakers, including screenwriter Robert J. Avrech, didn’t exactly heed their own advice about quaint, exotic characters—and the score, by Jerry Bock, composer of Fiddler on the Roof, genuinely made me cackle at times. (I’d like to create an equally insensitive alternate edit of the film that blindly substitutes tracks from the Yentl soundtrack. “Where Is It Written?” might accompany the tall, blonde Emily getting her first glimpse of the Hasidic community.) Its characters across all cultures are laughably one-dimensional, and in a twist my late grandfather would’ve relished, the Gentiles are portrayed as particularly stupid and crass. When Leah tells Emily that Rebbe’s wife and children perished in the camps, the shiksa repeats “Camps?” in confusion.
Other groaners abound, as when a robe-clad Emily pads through the darkened house and into the kitchen, where an embarrassed Ariel (up late reading, of course) averts his gaze as the tea kettle whistles. In a very ethnic, slightly comical take on the illicit barn dance from Witness, the heat later rises between Emily and Ariel as they watch each other from opposite ends of the table during a Shabbat feast, each stealing admiring glances as the other interacts with children. By the time they’re engaged in separate circle dances, making eyes at each other, you might jokingly hum a little Motown to yourself.
The rebbe, of course, sees all, and pointedly chooses to announce Ariel’s betrothal that very evening. (His intended, a French rebbe’s daughter played by future soap queen Rena Sofer with an accent so thick you could cut it with a knife, adds another layer of hilarity to the proceedings.) A Stranger Among Us has nothing equivalent to the majestic barn-raising in Witness or Kelly McGillis’s haunting bathroom scene. But after their heady Shabbos celebration, Emily and Ariel convene outdoors for an unchaperoned late-night conversation about Kabbalah and sex that is simultaneously one of the film’s best and worst sequences.
At Emily’s request, Ariel reads a passage that turns sexually explicit. “The Kabbalah’s filled with erotic imagery. Most of it’s theoretical,” he says uneasily. This indescribably awkward contrivance segues into a heartfelt conversation between two frustrated characters about marriage, romance and obligation, culminating in Emily exploding, “Yeah, well the Kabbalah obviously never figured on me!”
Ariel: The rabbis teach us that when God created the universe, He also created every soul that would ever exist. And then He made a match between every female and every male soul. So this way when you meet your soulmate, you say ‘She is my basherte.’ Or in your case, you would say ‘He is my bashert.’
Emily: Question.
Ariel: Please.
Emily: How come people are always breaking up? Or getting divorced, or they’re stuck in lousy relationships?
Ariel: It’s very simple. They have not found their true bashert. You see, everything is predestined. But we still have the freedom of choice. And often we make the wrong choice.
A STRANGER AMONG US (1992)
Their not-quite-lovers’ quarrel is Stranger’s real climax, and the scenes they share together without other characters are among its least cartoonish. If it seems I’ve given short shrift to the story’s criminal elements, including some low-level mob business (featuring a young James Gandolfini as a thug in the protection rackets), it’s because those subplots are egregiously sloppy and shallow, particularly the details of who killed poor Yaakov. Viewers will immediately identify the guilty party, leaving A Stranger Among Us with only one true mystery: How on earth a thirtysomething New Yorker hadn’t previously encountered Jews.
Streaming and DVD availability
A Stranger Among Us is available on both DVD and Blu-ray from KL Classics. If you’re hard of hearing, please note that neither release contains subtitles. You can also stream it at Amazon.
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.
… But wait, there’s more!
This was where I wanted to write about screenwriter Robert J. Avrech’s Jewish-oriented film work (and additionally note that this was, in part, a Sandollar production, as was A Smoky Mountain Christmas), but I’m temporarily thwarted by an availability problem. One of his credits is a 1988 Raquel Welch telefilm called Scandal in a Small Town, which I can’t currently find even on YouTube. [March, 2023 update: Here it is!]
The plot summary says it’s about a cocktail waitress (Welch) who lives in a small town and confronts her teenage daughter’s history teacher after learning he “spreads anti-Semitic, racist ideas amongst his pupils.” There are more colorful details I’ve omitted that you can read for yourself at IMDb, but the bottom line is that now I will not rest until I’ve seen this movie.
Finally, for anyone unfamiliar with my previous posts on the subject, this is where I should clarify that I’m Jewish (but not religious) and currently live in an Orthodox enclave.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
1 Pingback