I’m Your Woman: Film Review
I only became aware of Rachel Brosnahan when she started winning awards for Amazon Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (which is still on my watch list!) and she’s keeping it in the Amazon family with her star vehicle, I’m Your Woman, which she also produced.
The crime drama is set in the 1970s and follows Jean (Brosnahan) as she is forced to go on the run and hide in a completely unknown home, without any company except her baby son Harry, after her criminal husband Eddie (Bill Heck) betrays his partners, putting their lives on the line. Eddie’s former associate Cal (Arinze Kene) and his wife Teri (Marsha Stephanie Blake) help protect Jean by relocating her so she won’t be found.
What I loved most about I’m Your Woman, directed and co-written by Julia Hart, is how the layers of information are gradually peeled back as the film progresses. Before the action kicks off, we know extremely little about Jean, Eddie, and their marriage, but we are given nuggets of context and background as it goes forward to help us put the pieces together and form a good picture of their lives and what happened. It closely mirrors Jean’s situation as she has no idea what is going on, why she has to leave her home immediately with no belongings, and why she can’t make any new friends in her new location – her confusion is our confusion – and we get more clued in as she learns details from Cal and Teri.
It turns out that she didn’t know Eddie as much as she thought she did – each revelation makes her realise their life as she knew it was a complete lie. Brosnahan does a terrific job navigating this journey, going from a bewildered, confused, and naive kept housewife who is a terrible cook and still navigating new motherhood to an empowered woman who takes matters into her own hands and can handle herself without a man’s help. There is a moment where Brosnahan breaks down in tears but you can’t tell if she’s laughing or crying or a bit of both and I was like, yep, she’s an extraordinary actress.
She is the star of the show but she has great support in the form of Kene and Blake. He brought this soft, quiet, thoughtful energy, which served as a counterbalance for Jean’s wild panic, and Blake was a calm and capable ally who made Jean realise what she could be like too. I really liked this trio.
The only downside is that it didn’t need to be two hours long and it feels slow in places, particularly when Jean is bored without any company in her new locations. I get the purpose of those scenes as they show her isolation and loneliness and give us a sense that she’s going mad with all that time by herself but it made the movie feel longer than it should have been. Thankfully these lulls are usually followed by great moments of tension and intrigue and it all comes together to form a satisfying conclusion.
I’m Your Woman is an engrossing crime drama that serves as a perfect showcase for Brosnahan’s talents. I would like to see her lead more feature films, please!
On Prime Video from Friday 11th December