I’m Your Woman

It’s easy to become type­cast as an actor, to become so iden­ti­fied with a par­tic­u­lar role that an audi­ence can­not ful­ly believe you as any­thing else. Rachel Bros­na­han has received such lofty praise for her per­for­mance in The Mar­velous Mrs Maisel that it could well be what defines her entire career. In Julia Hart’s I’m Your Woman, how­ev­er, she goes com­plete­ly against type, demon­strat­ing the type of range that may yet unteth­er her from her icon­ic tele­vi­sion role.

Bros­na­han plays Jean, a glam­orous Val­ley of the Dolls-esque house­wife resplen­dent in hot pink feath­er-trimmed loungewear and over­sized sun­glass­es. The film opens with nar­ra­tion in her slow and jad­ed monot­o­ne: ​“Eddie and Jean met and fell in love. Eddie and Jean got mar­ried and bought a house. Eddie and Jean were going to have a kid but didn’t. So, every morn­ing Eddie kiss­es Jean and leaves the house and Jean is alone.”

What fol­lows is a solid­ly con­struct­ed Alice-down-the-rab­bit-hole jour­ney for Jean. Eddie brings home a baby for her to take care of, returns to his dodgy deal­ings and dis­ap­pears. Jean, in the dead of night and with­out enough time to even pack a suit­case, is forced to go on the run with the baby and Cal (an enig­mat­ic Arinzé Kene), though she is kept in the dark as to who or what she is run­ning from.

The film is entire­ly told from Jean’s point of view and, like her, we are large­ly kept in the dark. Jean’s sto­ry feels like one thread in a far-reach­ing and vio­lent chaos that, in its relent­less bru­tal­i­ty, catch­es many inno­cent bystanders in the cross­fire. As a whole this is a film of sub­tle and sub­ver­sive fem­i­nism, tak­ing what could have been a minor two-dimen­sion­al gangster’s wife char­ac­ter, nor­mal­ly framed as either greedy, com­plic­it or hys­ter­i­cal, and entire­ly cen­tring the nar­ra­tive around her.

This road movie has some lulls but is com­pelling for the most part, buoyed by a gor­geous ​’70s aes­thet­ic, a score of screech­ing strings and thun­der­ing piano keys and excel­lent sup­port­ing turns from Mar­sha Stephanie Blake, Frankie Fai­son and James McMe­namin. Themes of race, moth­er­hood and moral­i­ty pre­vail, as Jean – like a fly trapped in a spider’s web – attempts to free her­self only to become fur­ther entangled.