A well-intentioned movie about Sonja Horowitz (Renée Zellweger), the wife of devout Talmudic scholar Mendel (Glenn Fitzgerald). who is deeply unhappy. Mendel's brother Sender (Christopher Eccleston) sees this and hires her to work in the field in which she's already an expertjewelry. He also starts an affair with her, and then when she spends time with a Puerto Rican artist, he dumps her and betrays her to the family, which shuts her out. There's a subplot in which Sonja's dead brother talks to her, and apparently takes the form of a magical beggar woman, but why is not clear. Much is not clear, unfortunately, including what is going on with Sonja, why she tells the Rebbe there's a fire inside her and maybe it's not from god, and what this means, and what the magical beggar woman tells her means. To an extent the story touches on the plight of women in the ultra-orthodox community, and yet Sonja is not exactly liberated. Nor is the notion of being redeemed by the love of a man of another race very well-thought-out. The title comes from the biblical definition of the worth of a good womanand yet it's the bastard Sender who quotes it to Sonja. Zellweger struggles with the part; she's supposed to be a Jew from the mid-west and sometimes her accent is flat, and at other times it's taken on the characteristic sounds of Brooklyn. She's at her best when she's being tough and taking charge, but ultimately the movie's a mess.
Review of A Price Above Rubies
