Mark Reviews Movies: I'M YOUR WOMAN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 3, 2020

Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) seems to have it relatively good. She lives in a fine house. She's married to a man who provides her whatever she wants. Indeed, one day, after years of trying to have or adopt a child, Jean's husband Eddie (Bill Heck) walks through the front door holding a baby in his arms.

Jean doesn't ask any questions. It's not just the shock. She probably doesn't want whatever answers her husband will provide. They'll be either lies or, worse, the truth.

I'm Your Woman follows Jean from the moment the baby arrives and through a lengthy period of running and hiding from people who almost certainly would do her—and maybe her unofficially adopted child—harm. Co-writer/director Julia Hart's movie is a crime thriller in which most of the action and violence take place off-screen or in the background. That's not the point. The point is to give us a sense of helplessness and uncertainty, because Jean has little clue as to what's happening with her criminal husband and even less of a clue about what kind of man he actually is.

The concept is intriguing, and Brosnahan's performance carries a lot of it, even as Hart and co-screenwriter Jordan Horowitz give us an entirely obvious and mostly shallow progression of Jean's character. At the start, she's powerless to the point of almost being useless, moved around by men she barely knows on orders from her husband, trying stay quiet and anonymous in a safe house, failing even to fry an egg properly, and struggling to keep her son asleep through the night. By the end, she's much more knowing about her husband and the ways of his world, as well as a tough, gun-toting cookie.

The vital thing about Brosnahan's performance is how internalized it actually is. There are no big scenes or monologues, in which she breaks down from the pressure of her situation or finally asserts her independence over the course of her own life.

It's a quiet performance, perhaps best demonstrated by a single, little moment. After Jean is brought to the safe house, where she spends days cooped up in the place, there's a knock at the door. A neighbor has come to introduce herself, and when Jean answers the door, her voice croaks out a greeting to this stranger, because she hasn't had an opportunity or a reason to use her voice in some time.

The performance matches Hart's tone and approach, which is still—save for a few outbursts of violence, most of them in the third act—and patient. It's a story more about waiting than anything else. Jean waits for word about Eddie or for some news that her life can go back to normal. We wait for a payoff that seems destined from the moment one of Eddie's crime associates arrives with a bag of cash and a command to get in a car.

Jean's regular helper is a man named Cal (Arinzé Kene), who used to work for her husband and is now doing him the biggest of favors—making sure Eddie's family is safe. Eddie, a thief involved in some larger criminal enterprise, killed the big boss, for reasons we never learn and that don't really matter. Now, the dead boss' men are out for revenge.

Cal drives Jean and the baby a couple of days to who-knows-where. Along the way, she has a lot of questions that Cal either can't or won't answer. It's a bit disappointing how much of this story, which is so simple and so understated, is about unspoken exposition and back story, delayed until Jean has reached a point in her personal development to comprehend, accept, and do something about it. That tactic certainly doesn't allay our suspicions that the end points of Jean's evolution and this story are as apparent as they seem from the beginning.

Indeed, besides that obvious shift in character and the extreme change in perspective from the usual thriller, it's never entirely clear what point Hart and Horowitz are trying to make with this tale. The movie spends a lot of time in relative silence, observing Jean as she tries to make a life in hiding. The conversations—first with Cal and later, at a remote cabin after matters at the safe house go horribly wrong, with his wife Teri (Marsha Stephanie Blake) and father Art (Frankie Faison)—reveal some details, most of them about what's known and unknown regarding Eddie's situation or personal details that are actually telling a story about Jean's husband that give her reason to doubt him.

In other words, as much as Jean may change over the course of this story, she more or less remains a pawn in her husband's schemes, running and hiding and eventually shooting because her entire life has been and remains defined by Eddie's past and present actions. The movie claims to assert her independence from all of this, but throughout the entire story, Jean is just a passenger on a ride to the inevitable—violence happening nearer to and because of her.

That's not to say the movie doesn't work as a broad character study and a curious experiment in re-aligning the priorities of a thriller. It is to say, though, that the ambitions and effectiveness of I'm Your Woman end there.

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