The Media Tourist

Rachel Brosnahan breaks out on big screen as mob wife on the run

I’m Your Woman
Starring Rachel Brosnahan
Directed by Julia Hart
R
Dec. 11, 2020 on Prime Video

Since 2017, Rachel Brosanhan has been churning out laughs as a stand-up comedian on the Emmy-winning Amazon series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

But she swaps comedy for crime in this dapper, danger-spiked 1970’s-set character drama about a career thief’s wife who has to go on the run with a baby after her life takes a screeching turn for the worse.

Brosnahan is Jean, the bored suburban spouse of a slick hustler named Eddie (Bill Heck), who keeps her supplied with groovy stolen clothes and doesn’t care that she can’t cook. When Eddie walks through the front door one day with an infant, she of course wonders what’s up, asking if it’s a joke. “It’s all worked out,” Eddie assures her. “He’s our baby. It’s your baby.”

Then he lets a group of his gangster friends into the house, grins and winks at Jean, and closes the door behind him as he leaves her, baby on her hip, in the kitchen.

Most wives would have questions—a lot of questions. But when you’re the kind of wife married to a guy like Eddie, you don’t ask a lot of questions, because there aren’t a lot of answers. And there’s not a lot of time for questions. That night, while she’s sleeping, there’s an urgent knock on her door—it’s one of Eddie’s “associates,” who tells Jean that Eddie has disappeared, she’s in serious danger, and she’s got to get out of town—really, really fast.

Eddie’s friend gives her a satchel full of money, says there’s no time to pack and puts her and the baby, whom Jean has named Harry, into a car with a hulking driver named Cal (Nigerian-British actor Arinzé Kene). And they hit the road.

We can certainly relate to Jean’s nervousness, fear and sense of confusion; she tells Cal that she’s never been on her own. She knew her husband was shady, but doesn’t understand anything about what’s going on, or why she can’t get any information from the tight-lipped Cal, who turns out to be as good with calming a crying baby as he is with a gun. But where’s Eddy? Is he OK? Is anyone looking for him? “Everyone’s looking,” Cal tells her. “And they’re looking for you, too.”

Some answers—about what happened to Eddie, where’d the baby come from, and Cal—do come, in dribs and drabs. But the important thing is following Jean’s odyssey, and her evolution as she learns to live on the lam with baby Henry in tow.

Director Julia Hart, working once again with her husband-collaborator Justin Horowitz (the producer of La La Land) on the script, spins a tight, terrific, fem-centric tale of lower-tier mob life from the mob-wife perspective, balancing soft, tender, wistfully contemplative moments with ripples of explosive violence. An extremely tense scene involving a too-friendly, nosy new-neighbor lady (Marceline Hugot) reminds us—and Jean—that she’s dealing with some very tough, rough characters, baby or not.

As Jean and Cal try to stay one step ahead of goons and goombahs trying to close the messy loop Jean’s husband opened and set into lethal motion, it’s clear that I’m Your Woman isn’t just a crime story with a unique perspective. It’s a self-actualization, women’s-lib tale with a twist—about Jean’s “liberation” from her pampered, blinkered cocoon as a moll-doll accessory.

In a parallel of how many women of the ‘70s asserted their independence, Jean also proves that she can “do it all,” stepping into a new world, a man’s world—her man’s world—to care for a child, live on her own and build a life with a newly acquired skillset.

“Fuh, fuh, fire,” she enunciates to Henry, who’s watching her do something she’s never done—start a fire—in the fireplace of the cabin in which they’re hiding out. “Fire—I did that.”

Jean’s skills also expand as movie dips its toe into race relations of the era, when she and Cal get pulled over by a state trooper and she has to think fast to explain why she’s traveling with a Black man. (“I didn’t know I could lie like that,” she marvels afterward.) Later, she learns about a Black-owned hotel catering to Black families—especially ones that need a safe place to lay low for awhile. Her little white, suburban cocoon starts feeling farther and farther away.

In addition to her starring role The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, for which she’s received an Emmy and two Golden Globes, Brosnahan has appeared in numerous other TV series (including nearly 20 episodes of House of Cards), and she’s had small roles in more than a dozen movies. But this is her breakout film in every way, proving she’s so much more than a “TV actress,” and showing she can do so much more than Midge Maisel. I’m Your Woman puts her through a gauntlet, emotionally as well physically, from a hood’s pampered princess to a scrappy, survival-focused, pistol-packin’ mama.

And most mob movies don’t offer this kind of empathetic examination of motherhood. In a poignant scene in a diner, Jean explains to Cal her difficulty in conceiving a child—and her deep, long-unfulfilled yearning to have one. “And then in walked Eddie with a baby,” she says. Jean’s ongoing difficulty in cooking an egg—an ancient symbol of life and regeneration—also hints at her long struggle with fertility.  

Jean tells Cal how she soothes Little Henry by cooing Aretha’s Franklin’s “Natural Woman.” She may not realize it, in that movie moment, but we do—that the 1967 Top 10 hit addresses how baby Henry has touched her life in a profound way, re-awakened her maternal instincts and kicked something into gear that had been dormant for years.   

We meet several other characters, including Cal’s wife, Terry (Marsh Stephanie Blake, who played Berdie on Orange is the New Black and Vivian Maddow on How to Get Away with Murder), who has a surprising connection to Jean. Cal’s kindly father, Art (Frankie Faision, whom The Wire fans will remember as Commissioner Burrell), gives Jean an important introduction to using a firearm.

“Get used to the weight,” he says, pulling a sizeable revolver out of his pouch, and we understand the implication—it’s not just the heft, it’s dealing with the responsibility, the potentially heavy life-ending aftershocks of what you might do when you pick it up, point it and pull the trigger.  

I’m Your Woman is smart, stylish and saturated with the look and feel of the ’70s, popping with period detail—a freezer packed with TV dinners, a pink bedroom telephone, a pedestal ashtray in a hospital waiting room. It’s a parade of fab fashions in a palette of pastels and creamsicle hues; Jean may be on the run, but her wardrobe for herself and little Henry is never less than smashing. (Were there off-the-grid Baby Gaps back in the early 1970s? Just asking.) Big steel sedans prowl the streets like predatory sharks cruising for a meal. It’s a treacherous world, but it’s dreamy to sit back and watch it turn.

How fitting that another song from Aretha, her soulful cover of The Band’s “The Weight,” closes out the movie. Putting a finer point on Art’s earlier advice, it suggests that Jean can indeed handle the weight, the responsibilities of her new life, her new role, and whatever becomes the aftermath of whatever she’s got to do.

And so, too, can Brosnahan, in a rousing performance that proves that she can handle it, too, on TV or now in the movies. Got a gig? A comedy, a drama? She’s good with a pistol or a punchline. Give it to her. She’s your woman.