The Brooklyn Hasidic community, an interesting locale in itself, provides something essential to old-fashioned soap opera and presently hard to come by: a solid social and moral structure against which a curious-minded heroine might meaningfully and dramatically struggle. Here reinstated, and without recourse to a period setting out of Henry James or Jane Austen, we have an accepted code of conduct, the importance of reputation, and the destructive power of gossip. And we even have the spectacle, seen on screen as far back as D.W. Griffith but not seen lately, of the ostracized woman wandering the streets in disgrace with nowhere to turn. And we have also, one of the loftiest rationales of soap opera, the liberalizing experience of ourselves walking in her shoes. Writer and director Boaz Yakin has not made things easy on either her or us. She has already gotten herself deep into marriage and motherhood before she starts to wrestle openly with the question of whether she is cut out for the role of the dutiful wife of a Talmudic scholar, a budding holy man. ("We're not alone, Sonia," he tells her in explanation of his constraint in the bedroom. "We're under the eyes of God.") For one thing, she has, as best she can describe it, "a fire inside," in addition to a wealth of untapped gemological expertise picked up from her late father. What to do with these? A job in her brother-in-law's black-market jewelry store furnishes some makeshift solutions, not all of them calculated to win our approval, one of them, at least, calculated to shock. And nor does the unimpeachable goodness of the husband make things any easier when he begins to be served a steady diet at home of microwave dinners and philosophical provocation ("Do you love me more than God, Mendel?"). But that's the difference between soap opera and soapbox. What's liberating for the heroine must be liberalizing for the viewer, or it would merely be preaching to the choir. Renée Zellweger, churning up some complicated undercurrents beneath her creamy complexion, doesn't hurt the cause, either. Christopher Eccleston, Glenn Fitzgerald, Allen Payne, Julianna Margulies. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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