- I’m Your Woman
- Directed by Julia Hart
- Written by Julia Hart and Jordan Horowitz
- Starring Rachel Brosnahan, Arinze Kene and Frankie Faison
- Classification R; 120 minutes
“Admirable” can be the kiss of death for a film. Good intentions are well and fine, but if a movie doesn’t have much else to offer, then what’s the point? I found myself hurling this question around in my head until my skull broke while watching the new thriller I’m Your Woman.
Director Julia Hart’s film is indeed admirable in its conceit. So many crime films follow the men doing the dirty deeds, with only a quick glimpse at the women they sideline or leave behind. Here, Hart does away with the central bad man doing bad things right from the beginning, instead focusing on the wife, Jean (Rachel Brosnahan), who is now left to pick up the pieces of her shattered domesticity. With her husband missing, several gangsters looking to her for answers and a new ever-crying baby to take care of, Jean is now cast as the central antihero in a drama only partly of her own making.
Unfortunately, Hart and her co-writer/husband Jordan Horowitz don’t have much more to offer than a different perspective – and no POV shift can compensate for a film that looks otherwise so familiar in its twists and turns. And while Brosnahan offers a completely different performance from her Marvelous Mrs. Maisel act, even she occasionally looks bored with what trials and tribulations Jean must overcome.
Respect – ugh, that and “admirable” are truly damning-with-praise signifiers – must be paid, though, to Hart and her production-design team, which brings Jean’s vaguely 1970s-set world to life. Jean’s story might be no-frills, but the film certainly looks like it dipped into Amazon Prime Video’s surely Scrooge McDuck-sized vault more than a few times. That’s the kind of chutzpah that anyone can, well, admire.
I’m Your Woman is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video starting Dec. 11
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