Delayed Reaction: I'm Your Woman

Premise: The wife of a criminal goes into hiding after her husband does a job that puts her and her new baby in peril.

 

Based on the poster alone, I figured this movie was Baby Boom if Diane Keaton was willing to shoot her way into enrolling her kid in the right preschool. As much fun as that movie would be, the movie this actually is is pretty good too. I really like the trend lately of crime movies focusing on the wives often kept in the dark. Widows upends it nicely with wives who finish a job for their dead husbands. The Kitchen less successfully tells the tale of wives who take over the crime syndicate themselves. I'm Your Woman approaches it from a less grandiose scale by asking what it's like for the wife who really doesn't know what's going on.

 

While Rachel Brosnahan eventually does get her hands dirty, much of the movie is her responding like an actual crook's wife. She sits at home most days not asking questions. Her husband does crazy things like bring hope a baby he adopted for her since she can't have kids of her own, and when his associates come over, she doesn't ask why he's shutting the doors to keep her from hearing. When something finally goes wrong and an associate of her husband puts her and her son into hiding in the middle of the night, she's rightfully confused. I really loved how much the movie keeps Brosnahan in the dark. Information is very slowly delivered to her. The husband completely disappears after the first few minutes, not to return as some sort of mastermind. There's a whole movie happening offscreen with him and a power grab that eventually leads to his death. And the move is only concerned about it as far as it's tied to Brosnahan.

 

I was impressed with Julia Hart's even-handed direction of this. It resists the urge to go bigger yet never gets dull. It ends up being a collection of adventures - getting the baby, the long drive, the safe house, the cabin, the return to the city - more than a single story. Brosnahan does really well playing off scene partners who aren't giving much back - a baby or Arinze Kene as her very closed-off rescuer - or no one at all. She moves from the 50s in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to the 70s in this, where she fits just as well. It's odd. She doesn't look like someone who necessarily belongs in period settings. I hope she gets a few more chances to be in contemporary movies.

 

This could've been a much lazier movie. Brosnahan could've adopted a life of crime right away. There could've been a convoluted plot devised by her husband. The baby could've turned out to be stolen or something. Instead, it slow plays as much as it can and resists the urge to overcomplicate things. The aspects about her husband's first marriage are a little messy but make sense and feel earned. By the end, I believed where everything went on both a plot and character level. I was not expecting to be so pleased with this movie.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend