A Price worth paying
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A Price Above Rubies

A Price worth paying

 Go to A Price Above Rubies film page

By Philip French

Sunday 16 May 1999

guardian.co.uk

A Price Above Rubies (116 mins, 15) Directed by Boaz Yakin; starring Renée Zellweger, Christopher Eccleston, Allen Payne

One of Eastwoods lesser movies, The Rookie, was scripted by Boaz Yakin, who made a remarkable debut as writer-director with Fresh, about a 12-year-old seeking to control his life in Brooklyns oppressive black ghetto. Yakins new film, A Price Above Rubies, isnt quite as good, yet it too has the capacity to surprise and tells a story with a similar thrust. Renée Zellweger plays a Talmudic scholars discontented wife breaking out of her world in Brooklyns Hasidic community to become a shrewd businesswoman in the jewellery trade and to realise her sexuality. Freedom always comes with a price, says her exploitative brother-in-law (an impressive Christopher Eccleston) and she pays it. The film is as much concerned with ideas as with emotions, a mystical thread runs through it, and there are memorable performances as an aged rabbi and his wife by John Randolph and Kim Hunter, both blacklisted in the McCarthy era.