Melanie Griffith stars as a tough New York police detective who gets religion when she goes undercover in the Brooklyn Hasidic community in Sidney Lumet's A STRANGER AMONG US. An unlikely crossbreeding of WITNESS and SISTER ACT, the film initially lives up to its ridiculous premise but
actually gets better as it goes along.
Emily Eden (Griffith) is a maverick policewoman who likes to live on the edge but tends to get other people hurt; her partner, Nick Kemp (Jamey Sheridan), with whom she is "in deep lust," takes a knife in the stomach during a bust in which Eden decided not to call for back-up. Deciding that Eden
may be strung a little too tightly, her sergeant assigns her to an apparently less troublesome case. She is sent to investigate the disappearance of a young Hasidic diamond cutter, who has vanished with diamonds worth three-quarters of a million dollars. Eden at first sees an open-and-shut case,
but the plot thickens with the discovery of the diamond cutter's body stuffed behind the ceiling panels in his shop.
Eden decides to go undercover in the religious community to ferret out the killer, who may be among them. In the process, she develops a strong attraction for Ariel (Eric Thal), a Talmudic scholar who is already betrothed and who has his future carved out for him as a religious leader. Although
dating, much less marriage, is completely out of the question, the attraction is mutual. Ariel begins breaking what Eden calls his "big rule" by visiting her without a chaperone, though their relationship remains platonic. Unexpectedly, Eden finds herself getting in touch with her spirituality
through her contact with the Hasidim. Nevertheless, her initial suspicions prove to be true; the killer truly is among them, in the person of Mara (Tracy Pollan), a recent "convert" to conservative Judaism who had been engaged to the dead man.
Long before its release, A STRANGER AMONG US was dubbed "Vitness" by industry wags; one early review described it as a film about Hasidic Jews menaced by a vicious killer and too much Rembrandt lighting. At first, director Lumet and star Griffith seem determined to confirm the worst. The lighting,
indeed, is so pretentiously Old Master-like in the scenes involving the Hassidim that one keeps expecting the camera to pull back and show an art class working feverishly at their canvasses. Griffith's initial credibility as a New York cop is also sorely lacking, especially given her tendency to
show up at work dressed more for lunch at the Plaza than busting bad guys.
Fortunately, though, A STRANGER AMONG US gets better as it goes along. The characters take on depth as they approach the finish line, and the action becomes more engrossing--if also more implausable--as the plot develops. What starts as the search for a killer eventually becomes a surprisingly
moving quest for spiritual wholeness. At the end of the film, nobody gets what they want, though most get what they either need or deserve.
After portraying some memorably corrupt cops in Q&A, Lumet presents Eden as the equivalent of a religious leader--someone whose experience with evil has both hardened her soul and opened her eyes. After a rocky start, Griffith pulls off the part beautifully, showing the character's awakening in
small increments. Writer and co-producer Robert J. Avrech, whose last screenplay for Griffith was Brian DePalma's BODY DOUBLE, here does a fine job of delineating the tension between the worlds of the flesh and the spirit. Despite the high-concept kitchiness of its premise, A STRANGER AMONG US is
a satisfying drama with genuine star quality at its core. (Violence, profanity.) leave a comment
