More than any other major American filmmaker, Sidney Lumet, in works like The Pawnbroker' and Daniel,' has been willing to give Jewish characters central roles on the Hollywood screen. His latest movie, A Stranger Among Us,' does for the hidden world of the hasidim what Witness' did for the Amish of Pennsylvania. When "A Stranger Among Us" was previewed this spring at the Cannes Film Festival it caused a stir although hardly the kind Hollywood craves for. At a post-screening press conference, critics, unimpressed by director Sidney Lumet's foray into the closed world of New York ultra-Orthodox Jewry, hissed and booed the distinguished filmmaker.
It wasn't the only American movie to be greeted with hostility from French and other European critics the Michael Douglas thriller "Basic Instinct" sparked even louder catcalls but "Stranger" screenwriter Robert Avrech attributes the film's angry reception in Cannes not to anti-Americanism but rather to anti-Semitism. Avrech, an Orthodox Jew from Los Angeles, says the boos were inspired by his own earlier utterances at the festival about the prevalence of widespread anti-Jewish sentiment in France. "I have a big mouth," says Avrech. "I walked in basically saying J'accuse,' and a lot of people there resented it."
"Of course anti-Semitism was an element," agrees Lumet, speaking to The Jerusalem Report by telephone from New York. "We were in the heart of Le Pen country, and the French are not the noblest group in terms of their behavior to Jews. But it would be a trivializing of anti-Semitism which I consider an increasingly serious problem in all our lives for me to use that as an excuse for this movie's success or failure. This was simply not a festival movie; there's nothing startlingly original about it in its theme, or in its execution. It's a straight, commercial piece of work. For them, this was an American, not so much a Jewish movie."
However commercial in intent, "A Stranger Among Us" which opened in the United States on July 17 to mixed reviews is not a typical summer release or, for that matter, typical of most American films released at any time. The only other Hollywood movie to have focused explicitly on hasidim was "The Chosen," the sensitive 1981 screen adaptation of Chaim Potok's best-selling novel about the relationship between a modern Orthodox teenager and the genius son of a hasidic rebbe in Brooklyn after World War II.
"A Stranger Among Us," with its elements of suspense and romance, is rather more geared toward the box office. The film stars sexy Melanie ("Working Girl") Griffith as Emily Eden, a callous, world-weary and somewhat shallow Irish-American policewoman who goes undercover within an imaginary Brooklyn-based hasidic sect (the "Gencher" hasidim) to smoke out a murderer preying on the 47th Street diamond trade in Manhattan.
Accepted into the Gencher Rebbe's home and passed off as a ba'alat teshuvah (a newly observant Jew), Eden becomes deeply attracted to the moral values and psychic comforts inherent in strict ritual observance. She becomes even more attracted to the rebbe's brilliant, sensitive and handsome son, Ariel (Eric Thal), who cannot help but respond to her. Ultimately, her exposure to hasidism leaves Eden deeply and permanently changed.
The story bears a strong resemblance to the 1985 "Witness," in which Harrison Ford played a cop who infiltrates the Amish community in Pennsylvania after an Amish child inadvertently witnesses a killing. When "A Stranger Among Us" was slated for production last year together with a handful of other feature and TV projects about ultra-Orthodox Jews none of which, apart from Lumet's, ever made it to the finish line they were all sardonically dubbed the "Vitness" projects.
Avrech believes that "A Stranger Among Us" will find it difficult to match the box-office success of "Witness," especially since it never really had the chance of replicating the benign sense of wonder inspired by the Amish in that film. The Amish in "Witness" were depicted as charmingly anachronistic, and their value system, based on New Testament principles of non-violence and turning the other cheek, resonated appealingly among viewers. The meaning and sense behind hasidic values and rituals is not quite as easy to convey on film. And the image of "hasidim" (as the American media tends, incorrectly, to refer to all ultra-Orthodox Jews) in the public mind, among both Jewish and non-Jewish Westerners, is not entirely positive.
"The Amish have this bucolic, pastoral landscape," says Avrech, "this sea of golden wheat, and they all look wonderful. The hasidim in this film, in contrast, are seen within the framework of a horrible urban nightmare where nobody looks good."
But the film does have going for it the impressive box-office record of the 68-year-old Sidney Lumet, whose portfolio includes such hits as "Network," "Serpico" and "Dog Day Afternoon." Born and raised in New York (where most of his films take place), the director is the son of noted Yiddish actor Baruch Lumet, and was himself a child actor on the Yiddish stage. He has dealt with Jewish themes and characters many times on the movie screen, most notably in "The Pawnbroker," about a Holocaust survivor haunted by the past; "Bye Bye, Braverman," a humorous look at New York Jewish intellectuals; and "Daniel," based on E.L. Doctorow's novel about the son of an American Communist couple modeled on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Yet he says, "I'm not close to Judaism or hasidism in particular from a religious point of view. In fact, I'm not a religious man at all. I am, however, culturally very close to them. Hasidism came from the shtetl, as did my father. The hasidim certainly didn't come as strangers to me. I knew about them, knew some of them; I just didn't participate on any sort of religious level."
Avrech, in contrast, toiled for years to make a movie about observant Jews. After writing the Brian De Palma thriller "Body Double" (1984), he persuaded the ABC-TV network to produce his script "Scandal in a Small Town," which starred Raquel Welch as a mother in a small middle-American town who sues the local school when she discovers her teenage daughter is being fed anti-Semitic propaganda by one of her teachers.
"I've been working on this for years and years," says Avrech about "Stranger." "It was a simple case of cultural genocide that not one producer in town would do this project… you're not going to see another one like it for a long time."
Lumet disagrees with Avrech's view. " Cultural genocide'
these are big and violent words. It is absolutely true that Hollywood has not done a great many movies about Jewish life. But Hollywood never made a great many movies about black life. Finally blacks themselves started doing it, and that's overdue.
"Hollywood is not known for its courage in terms of dealing with minority situations and aspirations; it keeps trying to hit what it thinks is the great American, general, unwashed 12-year-old audience. But I think one has to be careful to save terms like cultural genocide' for the real thing."
Lumet took pains to assure his film's authenticity by hiring two rabbis (one of whom is Avrech's father-in-law) as halakhic consultants. Still, the film has a number of improbabilities. For example, it is unlikely that the son of a rebbe and a Talmudic genius would work in the New York diamond trade; he would probably spend his adult life in study.
It is also unlikely that hasidic men and women would be found (as they are in the movie) dancing in the rebbe's dining room without being separated by a mehitzah, or cloth divider, to keep them apart and out of each other's sight. The women would most likely have retired to the kitchen or parlor. And the relationship between Ariel and Emily would probably never have happened under any circumstances save the proddings of an insistent screenwriter and director. No rebbe's son would ever have been permitted to spend enough time alone with an unmarried young woman for any kind of bond to develop, romantic or otherwise.
Yet Lumet insists that "In terms of hasidic life in general, I think the movie is absolutely authentic. And one of the sadnesses to me is the one group that would know how perfect it is will never see it the hasidic community doesn't go to movies." Witness' goes to Brooklyn: Melanie Griffith is an undercover cop who falls for the son of a hasidic rebbe (Eric Thal; left); Sidney Lumet (below) on the set of A Stranger Among Us'