# Price Above Rubies, A (1998)

### reviewed by
Michael Dequina

A Price Above Rubies (R) * 1/2 (out of ****)

Renee Zellweger stars as Sonia, a young Jewish wife and mother frustrated by the constraints of her Hasidic community in Brooklyn. Her husband (Glenn Fitzgerald) is a religious scholar whose all-in-a-day's-work attitude on sex fails to tame the "fire" she feels within, as so she confesses to the rebbe (after hearing her fiery confession, the rebbe suddenly gets frisky with his pleasantly surprised wife--and dies the next morning). Sensing her frustration, her husband's brother (Christopher Eccleston) gives her a job in his jewelry brokering business in exchange for raw, passionless sex that just fans Sonia's still-burning flame. On the job, Sonia befriends Ramon (Allen Payne), a cool blast of hunky Puerto Rican water who does his own jewelry designs when not working as a grunt in an upscale jewelry store. Can fire-taming be far be that far behind for the ever-smoldering Sonia?

Just about everything in writer-director Boaz Yakin's rings false, starting with the improbably cast Zellweger, who does an adequate enough acting job but simply looks too WASPy for the role. A better fit would have been Julianna Margulies, who outshines Zellweger as Sonia's take-no-crap sister-in-law. Some of Sonia's baby steps toward liberation, such as indulging in a non-kosher egg roll in Chinatown, come off as silly. Yakin attempts to spice up the proceedings with a touch of magical realism--in the form of the recurring presence of Sonia's long-dead brother's ghost--make the story feel even more trite than it already is.

    Michael Dequina
    Chat Forum Host, The Official Michael Jordan Web Site
    http://jordan.sportsline.com

mj23@michaeljordanfan.com michael_jordan@geocities.com | mrbrown@ucla.edu

>My personal WWW sites< Mr. Brown's Movie Site: http://welcome.to/mrbrown Michael Jordan Beyond the Court: http://fly.to/michaeljordan A Michael Jordan Fan's Heartbreak: http://fly.to/mj23 Personal Page: http://welcome.to/w3md >Other WWW sites I work on< CompuServe Hollywood Hotline: http://www.HollywoodHotline.com Albany Online: http://www.AlbanyOnline.com Eyepiece Network: http://www.eyepiece.com

"I didn't know what to expect. It's like something you chase for so long, but then you don't know how to react when you get it. I still don't know how to react." --Michael Jordan, on winning his first NBA championship in 1991 ...or, my thoughts after meeting him on November 21, 1997

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews