After three seasons of Amazon's Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Rachel Brosnahan has become the fast-tongued, quick-thinking Upper West End comics princess of the public imagination. She played Jane in Amazon's new movie I Am Your Woman, which was a bit shocking.
Jane was a comatose suburban wife in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, and her husband left her in the chaos of the underworld. The film hints to us the nature of Jane's family life: her husband Eddie leaves her alone all day long, and his criminal life is basically a mystery to Jane except for its existence or not; Jane sleepwalks in life for so long that it takes her almost the entire film to wake up.
I Am Your Woman is a crime drama that looks through the other side of the telescope, from the point of view of innocent people, mostly women, who have to wait or suddenly migrate when their men are busy killing each other. The action scenes were filmed with a naturalism that added a welcome edge to the film; Terry, played by Blake, is awesome and she's essentially a smart woman. I Am Your Woman is full of lifeless atmosphere during its two-hour run, and as it slowly moves toward the end, you may wonder if she and Carl are really the protagonists, and Jean is just a passive bystander.
From the opening scene, writer-director Julia Hart's I Am Your Woman These characters are often the object of desire and contempt for the audience, either because they pull the male protagonist further into the depths of immorality, or because they are so sodomizing him that he cannot live with his boys in a machismo crime fantasy. The subversive premise here is simple: what if this female archetype is not only the protagonist, but also the recipient of our sympathy?
Thanks to Hart and her co-writer Jordan Horowitz, "I Am Your Woman" doesn't give us that simple, and it seems more straightforward to portray us as a smart feminist heroine with powerful, slurred witticisms that shatter the audience's perceptions.
Hart and Horowitz, in astonishing frugality, incorporate details of Jean's life into the first act. She and her husband, Eddie, were supposed to have a child, but her husband seemed to go to suspicious places a lot. Joan wasn't a good cook—she couldn't even fry two eggs; she valued her appearance and dressed herself carefully, as her perfect long blond hair suggested; she wasn't used to taking care of things alone, and didn't seem to know much about Eddie's affairs.
One day when Eddie suddenly appeared with a baby named Harry in her arms, she didn't even question it; Joan decided to take care of him like a mother, without asking any questions. But when one day she was thrown into a snake pit because a group of strangers broke into her home in an ordinary city. Forced to escape with the help of Eddie's old partner, Carl, she and her children are forced to escape, hiding in one roadside motel after another.
Similarly, she makes a powerful use of the chemistry between Brossnahan and Ken on screen, especially when the duo is stopped by a white cop and the frightened couple has to pretend they are a couple, and Hart's subtle exploration of American racism doesn't stop there.
As Carl's family — his serious wife Terry, son Paul, and loving father Alter — get into the camera, Jane becomes increasingly aware of her privilege as a white woman, no matter how tough she thinks her situation may be, and an eye-opener with Terry, but the conversation shows that she is only getting unfair currency because of her race.
I Am Your Woman is a slow-burning film, sometimes a bit overheated, that proudly revives an old-fashioned film with something new. In the process, Brosnahan also had plenty of room to become a completely different person than Mrs. Merzell—a helpless, abandoned woman who grew up to learn how to survive in a cruel world.