Taglines: In a dangerous world of mystery and intrigue, she’s going undercover searching for the truth.
A Stranger Among Us movie storyline. In New York, Detective Emily Eden is a tough detective and daughter of a former cop. When her partner Nick is stabbed during an arrest of two drug dealers, Emily is assigned to a case of missing person, Yaakov Klausman, in a Hasidic community. However she discovers that Yaakov, who worked cutting diamonds, was murdered.
Emily concludes that Yaakov knew the killer and asks the rebbe permission to work undercover in the community. The rebbe brings Emily to his home and his stepdaughter Leah and his stepson Ariel help her to know people in the community and understand their habits and rules.
Emily works in a department store with Leah, Ariel and Yaakov’s fiancée Mara, who was former drug addicted embraced by Yaakov and the rebbe, and her partner Levine gives support to her. Meanwhile Emily falls in unrequited love with Ariel. When the gangsters Tony Baldessari and Chris Baldessari threaten the group to sell protection to them, Emily believes she has resolved the case. But soon she has a discussion with Ariel and she concludes that the killer is another person from the community.
A Stranger Among Us is a 1992 film directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Melanie Griffith, Eric Thal, John Pankow, Tracy Pollan, Lee Richardson, Mia Sara, Jamey Sheridan, James Gandolfini, David Rosenbaum and David Margulies. It tells the story of an undercover police officer’s experiences in a Hasidic community. It was entered into the 1992 Cannes Film Festival.
Film Review for A Stranger Among Us
Audiences watching “A Stranger Among Us,” the latest film directed by Sidney Lumet, must try to believe that Melanie Griffith is Emily Eden, a street-smart New York City police detective who makes remarks like “you wouldn’t believe the things that I’ve seen” and “we were puttin’ down some perps, and one of them stuck him with a blade.”
They will also have to believe that in the line of duty it becomes absolutely necessary for Emily to go to Brooklyn and infiltrate the Hasidic Jewish community that is this film’s real focus. A new hair color, a chaster wardrobe and endless pointers on this group and its customs are required before Emily can complete her assignment and catch a killer.
It is also inevitable, if not exactly essential, that Emily attract the attention of a devout, modest young man named Ariel (Eric Thal), the son of the sect’s spiritual leader. “He is to Jewish learning what Mozart is to music,” another character says of Ariel, who will succeed his father one day. The tentative, forbidden romance that promises to spring up between Ariel and Emily is only one of the reasons Variety has dubbed this film “Vitness,” which is the perfect one-word description.
Although the premises of this film and of “Witness” are indeed similar, the parallel goes only so far. The world of the Hasidim in Borough Park is less prettily exotic than that of the Amish in rural Pennsylvania, a fact not lost on Disney’s Hollywood Pictures division as it tries to market “A Stranger Among Us” in mystifying ways. Printed ads for the film offer no clue to its real subject, showing only a huge likeness of Melanie Griffith and tiny, shadowy figures that have no identifying features.
This might as well be a representation of the famous “Twilight Zone” episode in which Agnes Moorehead battled tiny space invaders as that of a film trying earnestly to stimulate interest in Jewish precepts and traditions. But the seriousness of “A Stranger Among Us” is compromised from the start, since the otherwise articulate and lively screenplay by Robert J. Avrech makes too many concessions to Hollywood cliches.
The film’s guided tour of Hasidic life is eclipsed by an overlay of pulp storytelling, from the trumped-up murder plot to the problems Emily is having with her injured partner and beau (Jamey Sheridan). And the Hasidic characters, though vividly rendered, are diminished by the kind of sweeping generosity that makes each one a wise, kindly paragon. You’d have to visit Santa’s workshop to find another community as sunny and cooperative as this one.
“You people really care about each other!” Emily declares in astonishment as she begins to appreciate the film’s rosy vision of Hasidic life. As Andrzej Bartkowiak’s cinematography bathes the characters in a golden glow and Jerry Bock’s score gives the soundtrack a jaunty klezmer sound, the film dutifully explores everything from bread-baking for the Sabbath feast to funeral customs to the number of knots in the fringes of a prayer shawl.
Emily’s friendly guides, Ariel and his demure sister, Leah (Mia Sara, giving a disarmingly sweet performance), offer colorful bits of information whenever possible, and so does their father (Lee Richardson), who as rebbe is the group’s patriarchal authority figure. It requires another great stretch of the imagination to believe that the rebbe would take the tough, profane, flirtatious Emily under his wing.
Since “A Stranger Among Us” is the work of Mr. Lumet, it has been made with the kind of technical assurance that should have dispelled more of its problems. As this seasoned director provides yet another slice of New York life, the film abounds with small, sharp characterizations and lively contrasts. Even a car chase and shoot-out in the diamond district of Manhattan, however weary it is conceptually, has been lent a degree of verve by Mr. Lumet’s staging and Andrew Mondshein’s brisk editing. But the film makers’ proficiency is overpowered by their piety and by their tendency to sugarcoat the material.
Allowing for the improbability of their attraction (and for a romance that is automatically dead-ended by their situation), Ms. Griffith and the newcomer Mr. Thal still manage to develop a rapport. Ms. Griffith blusters and wisecracks her way through some of the story’s most awkward junctures, and Mr. Thal very nearly becomes a rabbinical scholar with sex appeal. John Pankow provides comic relief as Emily’s police department sidekick, and Tracy Pollan registers despair as the sweetheart of the murdered man, while Ro’ee Levi has a couple of amusing moments as Emily’s secret admirer. The extremely farfetched solution to the murder mystery is not helped by a shrill, over-the-top performance from the perpetrator.
The Borough Park scenes in “A Stranger Among Us” were shot in Ridgewood, Queens, which has been painstakingly modified to resemble the Hasidim’s home territory. It would countermand all the film’s lessons about the seclusion and spirituality of Hasidic life if this group had made itself party to the filming.
A Stranger Among Us (1992)
Directed by: Sidney Lumet
Starring: Melanie Griffith, Eric Thal, John Pankow, Tracy Pollan, Lee Richardson, Mia Sara, Jamey Sheridan, James Gandolfini, David Rosenbaum, David Margulies
Screenplay by: Robert J. Avrech
Production Design by: Philip Rosenberg
Cinematography by: Andrzej Bartkowiak
Film Editing by: Andrew Mondshein
Costume Design by: Gary Jones, Ann Roth
Set Decoration by: Gary J. Brink
Art Direction by: W. Steven Graham
Music by: Jerry Bock
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and violence.
Distributed by: Buena Vista Pictures
Release Date: July 17, 1992
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