![]() Kene, a star of the British stage and TV, suggests depths of struggle, triumph and anxiety beneath Cal’s polite, impassive surface. (Watching Jean carting him around, your heart won’t skip a beat the way it might have when Llewyn Davis schlepped a cat onto the subway.) He’s played by a trio of kiddos with character-actor faces (Jameson and Justin Charles, Barrett Shaffer), and Hart captures them reacting to their surroundings and exchanging glances of mutual discovery with Brosnahan, lovely jolts of unforced feeling.īy contrast, the exchanges among the adult characters can be exceedingly measured, a reflection of their respective wariness. The helmer doesn’t sentimentalize Harry, turn him into a MacGuffin or exploit his vulnerability to danger. (In an indication of how circumscribed and lonely her life is, there’s no concern about friends or neighbors who might take notice of her sudden parenthood.) But Hart handles the encounter with a matter-of-fact appreciation of its absurdity, smartly underplaying its momentousness and emphasizing Jean’s numb, muffled astonishment. The scene in which he presents this living offering to his wife, with the assurance that “it’s all worked out,” might trigger a viewer’s Raising Arizona expectations (or fears). Like the items of froufrou loungewear that Eddie would bring home with their price tags still attached, the baby is one of his surprise gifts. It’s not merely that Harry is only a few months old, but that he entered her life as unexpectedly as Cal has. That’s critical know-how because Jean is in a state of discombobulation over the son she’s still getting to know. ![]() Not least among his talents is his calming effect on Harry. Jean and Harry are tossed into the night with a bag of cash and a driver, the closemouthed Cal (Arinzé Kene), who used to work with Eddie and takes charge of Jean’s escape with quiet efficiency. After his (offscreen) activities force him underground and make targets of his wife and son, his minions swing into action. He’s the kind of forcefully cheerful guy who’s unperturbed by her botched eggs, and who commands a cadre of loyal followers even after he sets a whole world of revenge in motion. In his ultra-brief screen time, Bill Heck ( Locke & Key) makes an impression as Jean’s husband, Eddie. This is the most compelling angle of the feature, the way it thrusts a sheltered white woman into the protective grace of people she’d otherwise never encounter - people who, by necessity, have made endurance an art form. As Jean says at a crucial point along her getaway trajectory, “I’ve never been on my own.”īut even with Eddie in hiding, location unknown, Jean doesn’t go it alone: Her lessons in survival arrive courtesy of a Black family with reluctant ties to her AWOL spouse. Even domestic basics elude her: In a metaphor that’s pushed way past the boiling point, we repeatedly witness her culinary ineptitude with eggs. Forced to hit the road, baby in tow, after her hubby’s criminal maneuvers put his rivals on her trail, Jean is torn out of her cocoon - a state of suspension and denial that, in keeping with the 1970s setting, you might call suburban ennui.Ī pampered possessor of negligible skills, Jean begins her odyssey with none of the tough resourcefulness of Gloria, Gena Rowlands’ title character in the 1980 Cassavetes movie, also a tale of a woman and child on the run from vengeful mobsters. Crossing crime-thriller nuts and bolts with a sensitive character study, she and producer Jordan Horowitz ( La La Land), her screenwriting partner and husband, trace a hard-won awakening for Jean. Maisel.ĭirector Julia Hart’s concern with female protagonists in inhospitable worlds takes a turn, in her fourth and strongest feature, into stripped-down genre territory. ![]() This is especially the case for the boy’s mother, Jean, played by Rachel Brosnahan with a caught-in-the-existential-headlights stillness that’s the diametric opposite of her vivid, hyper-verbal Mrs. The grown-ups, on the other hand, all seem to be holding their breath, clenching their jaws, looking over their shoulders. That makes sense he’s the only one who hasn’t a clue what a mess of danger is closing in around him. The most openly expressive character in the on-the-lam drama I’m Your Woman is a baby.
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