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‘A Stranger Among Us’
By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
July 17, 1992
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In "A Stranger Among Us," policewoman Melanie Griffith is moving in on two dangerous punks standing in a movie line. She and partner Jamey Sheridan approach the criminals at the ticket window, guns drawn."Assume the position!" says Griffith. The two men are shocked, but not so much at being arrested. It's that voice. This isn't the bark of a no-nonsense, take-charge woman. It's the squeak of a laryngitic munchkin. They just got busted by Betty Boop. Understandably, they make a run for it. You might make a run for it too, before seeing this Hollywood Pictures howler from the Disney people. This opening scene is meant to show Griffith as one tough modern-world cop. She loves to make a bust -- without backup. She has sex with people she doesn't love. And she talks salty, just like her ex-cop Dad. But "Stranger" isn't another cop show. It's worse. It's a lesson movie. Wounded by one of the youths, Sheridan (also Griffith's sex pal) spends the rest of the movie in a hospital. Without a partner, Griffith is sent to track a missing person in the Hasidic community. When he turns up dead, she believes the killer is a trusted member of the tightknit sect -- and still at large. Posing as a Jew, she moves in with rabbi ("Rebbe") Lee Richardson and his adopted children, rabbinical scholar Eric Thal and meek, intelligent Mia Sara. A consciousness-raising sitcom begins, as wacky Catholic goyim Griffith reacts to this peculiar, traditional world. "Hi," she says with cutesy klutziness to a roomful of somber Hasidim waiting to speak with the great Rebbe. Informed she cannot stay alone in the room with religious devotee Thal, she retorts, "What, are you planning on jumping on my bones?" When Thal tells her about the mystical cabala, a religious philosophy dating back to the Middle Ages, her reaction is, "I bet it's from California, right?" Well, fiddle dee dee. Things change, of course. Griffith will learn to eat matzo balls, and keep her meat and dairy separate. "You people really care about each other," she'll breathe later. She'll develop an attraction of opposites for Thal. Of course, the virginal scholar -- untutored in modern flirtatious ways -- will like her back. Meanwhile, early evidence of the mystery killer will point to a couple of Italian stereotypes putting a protection squeeze on the family. Director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Robert J. Avrech (who scripted the misogynistic "Body Double") provide informed details about the Hasidim and the ways of the cabala. But, in the context of this movie, it's a Hallmark-card tribute. The Rebbe's family is constantly bathed in fuzzy reverential light; and cabala poetics ("God counts the tears of women") are reduced to cheesy mush. As is often the case, Griffith's inspiration-free performance attests merely to an ability to memorize a script. She has a slow, halting delivery, as if she's being fed her lines through a hidden earphone. She is sensationally miscast in this role. Nothing she says is believable. When the Rebbe, a survivor of Auschwitz, tells her, "We both are on intimate terms with evil," it's a bit much. Maybe she's seen a little elbow-pushing for the lift chair at Aspen, but intimate with evil? Oy vey.
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