[Review] I'm Your Woman(2020) {6.5/10}

Directed by Julia Hart from a screenplay by Hart and Jordan Horowitz, the film stars Rachel Brosnahan (Jean), Arinzé Kene (Cal), Marsha Stephanie Blake (Teri), Bill Heck (Eddie) and James McMenamin (White Mike).

Set in the 1970s, the plot follows Jean (Rachel Brosnahan), a young housewife and brand new mother. Her quiet life is disrupted when she's awakened in the middle night by her husband's colleagues and told she's in danger. She and her baby go on the run with a driver (Arinze Kene) who's been assigned to keep her safe.

Hart's slow burn doesn't have enough fuel to grab your attention beyond an intriguing premise. The execution just isn't there. The problem does not originate with Hart and Horowitz, who both seem to be intelligent and even artistically sensitive. But an entire social layer has been gripped by an obsession with gender and race largely to the exclusion of everything else, even as the burning problems of social inequality, mass poverty and the danger of dictatorship blow up in their faces. To an unhealthy extent, their films are not drawn from life as it is, but life as it appears in certain petty-bourgeois, identity politics recipe books. Hand in hand with the concentration on gender, inevitably, goes a fixation with race, which is perhaps even more harmful here. Arinzé Kene is also a fine actor, and the permanent state of anxiety he suggests strikes the proper note. However, the African American characters in I’m Your Woman are expected to hold the moral high ground and demonstrate sagacity and coolness throughout in a manner that feels thoroughly false and contrived. Brosnahan is wonderful and I'm Your Woman offers an exacting replication of '70s-era filmmaking while turning a classic story template on its head. Too bad it's still not compelling or dramatic enough to hold your interest consistently. It's not exactly the type of suspense that keeps us glued to our seats.

I’m Your Woman is now available on Amazon Prime Video.