Maisel” role, Brosnahan is a blank in this one, going through the film stunned and inexpressive. But how does Jean feel about this? If riding around with a Black man in the ’70s seems odd to cops - enough so that Hart makes a point of it - it would be nice to know Jean’s impressions. The man orders Jean to grab “her” infant and a satchel full of cash, and to meet up with someone named Cal (Arinzé Kene).Ĭal is African American, which serves as another kind of statement, as in a scene where a police officer pulls them over to ensure that the white woman is safe. Jean seems to intuit that the fewer questions asked, the smoother her life will go, which is true, until she’s awakened by banging on her door in the middle of the night by one of Eddie’s associates. She has grown accustomed to receiving outrageous gifts from her husband, like the tacky new fuchsia nightgown she wears in the opening scene. He’s our baby,” he says, and Jean doesn’t seem to question it. In the film’s surreal opening scene, Eddie (Bill Heck, playing the suave, bell-bottomed lawbreaker such a movie would usually be about) comes home and presents his wife with a stolen kid. Presumably, a similar case could be made for telling the film from baby Harry’s point of view: What will become of the boy when he grows up, once he discovers that his dad was a thief, his mother learned to shoot in order to protect him and - here’s the movie’s most unexpected detail - he was stolen from his birth parents? After her husband’s latest robbery goes awry, she’s left to fend for herself and her infant child. The hard part is what you actually do when the time comes.” Much will depend on what Jean does in that moment, although there’s an awful lot of dead air before she draws her weapon.Īny protagonist can be compelling if written and performed as such, but unlike the wives of “Widows,” Jean is much too passive: a sheltered housewife with no practical skills for surviving on her own. When Frankie Faison’s Art asks if she knows how to handle a gun, Jean shakes her head and says, “My husband wouldn’t even let me drive the car.” We don’t learn a lot about Brosnahan’s backstory in this film, but we’re meant to read between the lines and extrapolate from her behavior - as with Faison’s next piece of advice: “Listen, anyone can learn to shoot. “I’m Your Woman” takes the opposite tack: Brosnahan’s character, Jean, isn’t exceptional. Why not make Ripley a woman in “Alien,” or cast the secret agent in “Salt” with Angelina Jolie? Call it the Ginger Rogers approach, where unsung women are shown doing everything that men can, except “backwards and in high heels,” which lends itself to gender-blind casting. Maisel,” which does exactly that, celebrating the above-and-beyond experience of a high achiever in a field traditionally dominated by men - in that case, stand-up comedy. “I’m Your Woman” star Brosnahan is best known for “The Marvelous Mrs. ![]() There’s another solution, which is to make a film in which the woman isn’t just the “wife of,” but more proactive and accomplished than her male cohorts. Such well-balanced stories make these women not just beneficiaries of their husbands’ bad acts, but antiheroes in their own right. Consider Edie Falco in “The Sopranos,” who’s at least as rich a character as her husband, or Lorraine Bracco in “Goodfellas,” who falls for a gangster and whose slow conversion to bad gal is arguably the point of that film. Except, the best examples of the genre do make room for the wives and the girlfriends. “I’m Your Woman” features Rachel Brosnahan in the other side of a story that has often, but not always, focused on men. ![]() … And since I never got to see that in those movies, I just decided to make that movie myself.” “I just always found myself wanting to follow the woman. It’s bad form for reviews to quote from press notes, but this insight from Hart warrants repeating: “The moment the door closes in Diane Keaton’s face in ‘The Godfather.’ The moment Tuesday Weld gets in the car in ‘Thief,’” she explains. Writer-director Julia Hart (“Fast Color”) has seen more crime films than she can count, and she has concluded that these movies have a bad habit of underutilizing their female characters - the girlfriends and wives who get shunted to the side when the going gets tough.
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