Unorthodox Arrangements

[question everything]

JANUARY 23, 2009

Unorthodox Arrangements
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
WSJ

It's a given that in Hallmark Hall of Fame productions darkness may threaten, but not for long. The great trick of these gleaming, handsomely mounted dramas has always been their capacity not just to triumph over their own predictability, but also to make that predictability a virtue. The improbable end is clear from the beginning -- the charm lies in the journey. That's show business and that's "Loving Leah" (Sunday, 9-11 p.m. EST, on CBS) -- a story of love, marriage, faith and some highly unlikely complications of religious observance among Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Leah (Lauren Ambrose), a young newly widowed member of this Orthodox community, harbors ambitions and tastes that complicate her life. She wants to go to college and loves running off to movies, though nothing unsavory -- this is a Hallmark film. At a run-down neighborhood theater she sits, enchanted, watching "Moonstruck," barely able to tear herself away. This is furthermore the day she has to contend with a matchmaker who has dropped in with a potential new husband in tow -- a visit arranged by Leah's mother, the formidable Malke (Susie Essman).

But infinitely greater complications have come about from the death of Leah's rabbi husband. She's informed that an ancient marriage law requires a single man to marry his brother's widow if she is childless, to assure that the deceased's name not die out. The single brother in question is Jake (Adam Kaufman), a worldly young doctor who has shed all religious practice, much like his mother, Janice (Mercedes Ruehl), who calls herself a Reform Jew -- which is roughly the same as no kind of Jew in the eyes of Leah's devout family. Being a Reform Jew, though, has nothing to do with the display Janice puts on at the funeral of her rabbi son, to which she's arrived, late, in a dress showing off her legs and a peek of cleavage -- never mind the open-toe shoes. Why should the assembled mourners stare at her, she wonders irritably.

Janice's opaqueness doesn't particularly stand out in this saga, larded as it is with so much else that's implausible, but that's not to say the picture of Leah's world lacks authenticity. The details -- the religious practices (except for that marriage law hauled from ancient history), the clothes, the neighborhood teeming with kosher stores, the Sabbath bustle, and the community are vividly rendered here. So is the state of mind of a young woman torn between those roots and the call of a wider world -- to the dream of college, and to other places that have fired her stubborn yearnings.

It's the kind of character -- wary, innocent, powered by a brooding defiance -- that Lauren Ambrose seems to have been born to play, and she does so here to superb effect. She's the glue that holds this preposterous tale together, and it's an absorbing one. You may not love Leah -- impressive though she is smacking her dough around for the baking of Sabbath challahs -- but you'll be glad she's there.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123266312422707725.html (subscription, I think)