"I'm Your Woman" takes absorbing angle on crime picture with sensational turn by Rachel Brosnahan


I’m Your Woman (2020)


What if a 1970s-set crime picture was told from the point-of-view of a mob moll who has been kept in the dark and gets sent away? Usually, the moll would be a tertiary character who’s immediately sidelined, but director Julia Hart (2018’s “Fast Color”) takes the initiative with “I’m Your Woman,” co-writing the script with husband Jordan Horowitz, and it is a crackerjack piece of ‘70s-style filmmaking. The crime is existing somewhere but not really the focus, and with bursts of violence, the film is as much of a thriller as J.C. Chandor’s “A Most Violent Year.” 


Housewife Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) has never had to crack an egg or cook a day in her life, and she has never been on her own. When her shadily employed husband, Eddie (Bill Heck), comes home one day with a baby boy and hands him over, Jean doesn’t know how to react, but she ends up naming him Harry and learning how to care for him. When one of Eddie’s accomplices pounds on her door at night, he gives Jean a gun and $200,000 cash, and has her pack her bags. Another one of Eddie’s accomplices, Cal (Arinzé Kene), is sent to look after Jean and Harry. No one is telling Jean anything, like what Eddie is involved in and who is after him, but she cannot trust or talk to anyone. She just needs to get out of Dodge now.


“I’m Your Woman” dispenses information deliberately, operating at the same speed Jean gets answers to her questions. The safe house that Cal drops Jean off at would seem like the setting for a mundane series of scenes for the housewife to discover how to cook, but a paranoid sequence with nosy neighbor woman Evelyn (Marceline Hugot) is genuinely tense. Once Cal picks Jean up and takes her to a desolate cabin, the film introduces another group of characters, including Cal’s wife Teri (an excellent Marsha Stephanie Blake), his father Art (Frankie Faison), and son Paul (Da’Mauri Parks), that pave an unexpected path.


Rachel Brosnahan (Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) is sensational as the naïve Jean, who’s first introduced as a cushy housewife lounging in the backyard smoking and drinking until clipping off the tag on her purple robe becomes the biggest conflict of her day. If Brosnahan could handle the snappy patter of Amy Sherman-Palladino as Midge Maisel as if it were second nature, she certainly brings feeling to the part and Jean earns her maternal instincts and self-sufficiency. By the end, Jean is surely a different person than she was at the beginning. Arinzé Kene is also superb as Cal, and his non-romantic scenes with Brosnahan are lovely, including their moment in a diner where Jean quietly sings Aretha Franklin’s “A Natural Woman,” the same song that gets her baby laughing.


Evoking the aesthetics of the time with zoom-outs, director Julia Hart finds tension in long tracking shots by cinematographer Bryce Fortner. The film isn’t flashy or overly stylized but recreates the period detail in a way that’s fun without careening into parody. Aska Matsumiya’s score also builds ominous portent; there’s an effectively executed car chase, as if we thought we needed another one of those; and a shoot-out in club Fox Den is harrowing, staged inside a phone booth from behind Jean as she crouches down before she escapes, gets out of the rain, and gets dry in a laundromat to let out a cathartic cry. A grown-up entertainment that can be unforgiving even when it forgives, “I’m Your Woman” is absorbing every step of the way. 


Grade: B +


Amazon Studios is releasing “I’m Your Woman” (120 min.) on Prime Video on December 11, 2020. 

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