- Movie Rating -

I’m Your Woman (2020)

| December 31, 2020

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I have not been able to go to movie theaters nor film festivals.  So now, with the help of award-season screeners, this month I am catching up.


I love good exploitation, but I must admit that I have a general distaste for homages the exploitation.  Some things just can’t be duplicated, although I admit a loving admiration for films like Black Dynamite and nearly every movie directed by Tarantino.  Added to that spool is Julia Hart’s I’m Your Woman which takes the most sidelined of 70s characters – the long-suffering housewife – and puts her in the center of the action.  What comes out the other end is an intoxicating mix of groovy action, mixed with a drama that has just enough for the gray matter.

Rachel Brosnahan steps out of the Miss Maisel pastels and into the polyester world of hitmen and gunplay, all with a baby in tow.  She plays Jean, a bored housewife whose husband is always away.  The kid is not theirs.  Her husband Eddie (Bill Heck) comes home one day with the bundle under his arm and speaking cryptically about how he is suddenly theirs.  Questions float in the air but before long Eddie has gone missing and an associate comes by, hands her a bag of cash and tells her to get out of town.

Shortly, yet another man comes calling.  This one a quiet newcomer named Cal (Arinzé Kene) comes to the door telling her that she has to hit the road.  Without answering a lot of questions, Cal bundles up the girl, the cash and the baby and suddenly they are on the run.  Thankfully, we are still just as much in the dark as Jean.

The movie doesn’t answer the questions all at once.  Hart has the patience to let things happen gradually so that we are always learning new things as the plot unfolds.  This is a road picture about two people who are constantly in the cross-hairs but it doesn’t go where we expect it to go.  First of all, there is a connection between Jean and Cal but not a romance.  The parentage of the kid remains a question mark.  And for a long while we’re not entirely sure where Eddie has gone.

Some questions are never really answered but that’s okay, it’s part of Jean’s disorientation having to spin and twist in a world of bullets, shadowy figures and bags of question marks.  Some critics have seen the disorientation as a flaw in the narrative but I saw it as a reasonable trek through a world in which the stakes keep changing.  This is one of those movies that asks you to be patient, and when it is over you still have questions, but not obvious ones.  We know what we need to know, and that’s alright with me.

Now streaming on Amazon Prime.

About the Author:

Jerry Roberts is a film critic and operator of two websites, Armchair Cinema and Armchair Oscars.
(2020) View IMDB Filed in: Uncategorized
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