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.
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