Once, years ago, I accompanied a woman I was dating to her father’s house to feed his cat while he was out of town. The house was tucked away in an upstate backwater, one of those “census-designated places” that you can pass clean through before you’ve had time to take your foot off the gas. When we arrived, someone else was inside, already feeding the cat. I wasn’t surprised, given what I knew of my girlfriend, that her father had arranged for backup pet care. I was surprised, however, that the backup was Frank Serpico, the corruption-busting police officer portrayed by Al Pacino in Sidney Lumet’s 1973 film Serpico.
I recalled this encounter while watching Julia Hart’s I’m Your Woman, a faux-'70s crime drama starring Rachel Brosnahan and Arinze Kene, now streaming on Amazon. It wasn’t just that much of the movie takes place at a rustic cabin where Brosnahan’s character, Jean, is hiding out from criminals and killers, as I’d imagined Mr. Serpico to be hiding out, informally, from old enemies. (Wrong: He was running, loud and proud, for a spot on the town board.) No, it was that this 21st-century take on '70s grit seemed as harmless as 21st-century Serpico, in his seventies, scooping Friskies into a bowl.
I’m Your Woman has a perfectly serviceable setup. Jean is a housewife with seemingly nothing to do. When we meet her, she’s slumped in a lawn chair, dressed in a fur-trimmed fuchsia robe and huge octagonal sunglasses, smoking a cigarette and drinking white wine. Bobbie Gentry’s “I Wouldn’t Be Surprised” plays softly. Jean looks nearly frantic in her boredom. What’s missing from her life, we soon learn, is a baby, and we learn this because her criminal husband, Eddie (Bill Heck), brings her home one and then promptly disappears.
We know that Eddie is off to do crimes, but what kind? Is he a drug smuggler, like Fernando Rey’s Alain Charnier in The French Connection? A bank robber, like Steve McQueen’s Doc in The Getaway? Does Jean know what Eddie does? What moral compromises has she made to be with him? (Well, she did just accept a baby of unknown provenance.) Eddie must be a pretty bad guy because in no time flat, he’s either dead or on the run, and suddenly, the film’s entire criminal underworld is variously looking for or looking out for Jean.
In the latter category, we have Cal (Kene), a laconic associate of Eddie’s, who brings Jean and “her” new baby to an empty safe house and tells her to await further instructions. Their trip isn’t without incident. First, the baby develops a fever and must be hospitalized without any paperwork to demonstrate who, in fact, he is. (Jean names him Harry, but we might as well call him Baby MacGuffin.) Then, after passing the night on the roadside, Jean and Cal are harassed by a suspicious patrolman because Cal is black and, therefore, must be kidnapping this fragile, china-completed doll.
That series of scenes, featuring a man and a woman with a baby who isn’t quite hers and definitely isn’t his, has a flight-into-Egypt quality and almost elevates I’m Your Woman to a Christmas movie. But more important, it alerts us to the film’s ambitions as an exploration of racism. “I made a white baby,” Cal says, still in shock, after Jean has lied their way out of danger by declaring him her husband. The movie clearly means to examine misogyny and patriarchy as well: Jean is in this mess because of a man, and it’s because she’s a woman that everyone in the film underestimates her, at their peril.
This isn’t to say that Jean is a natural heroine. The film does much to establish her appearance of helplessness—she can barely cook eggs and toast, can’t really drive, sings without confidence, and spends much of her screen time panic-breathing—before allowing the pressure of a seemingly inevitable gangland hit to turn her into a diamond. Jean is aided in her transformation by Teri, Cal’s wife, who, thanks to a subtle, stoic performance by Marsha Stephanie Blake, dramatizes our own ambivalence toward Jean. The broad, gender-blind message that nobody commands respect until he or she has been through the wringer comes through loud and clear.
The “wringer” part of I’m Your Woman isn’t, sadly, very much fun. There’s a nightclub shootout that showcases the film’s spectacular attention to period costume and music but doesn’t otherwise leave a scratch. The car chase is so timid, so unworthy of the decade that gave us The French Connection and The Seven-Ups, that one wonders what all these gorgeous, shark-finned automobiles have been doing onscreen at all. The choreography of pursuit and violence is crucial to this type of picture, and I’m Your Woman has two left feet.
Where I’m Your Woman succeeds in being grim and gritty, the moves can feel dutiful, and sometimes, they militate exasperatingly against our sympathies. The moral logic of a crime flick is never straightforward, but when a film troubles to set up its heroes as victims of sexist neglect or racist presumption and then has them execute a senior citizen without a second thought, the question isn’t whether its priorities are in order so much as whether they’re sincere. Is this a movie with a message, or is it a social critique, crudely and tentatively advanced, with a movie thrown together as its vehicle? HBO’s The Deuce, to take one example, did so much more with this material.
A more challenging approach might have issued from the fact that Jean isn’t, in fact, an innocent housewife. In the very first scene, we see her ripping tags off her fuchsia robe, doubtless in the knowledge that boosting women’s wear is the least of Eddie’s criminal enterprises. The only thing to justify her keeping a stolen baby is that she knows at least one of its parents is dead. Her see-no-evil complacency is as much to blame for her predicament as Eddie is, and the impulse to point this out seems far less misogynistic than the impulse to let her off the hook. A condescending tenderness toward women may be the only thing to keep us rooting for her. How’s that for a plot twist?
The worst thing on offer here is the dialogue, stilted stuff that feels written by a committee with no point of reference but other movies. There’s no soul here, nothing memorable, nothing quotable, nothing much to elicit that slightly embarrassing action-movie frisson. We are to believe that Teri is good, despite being as compromised as Jean, because she dispenses stern maternal wisdom: “Do you cook for your family? Then you’re the greatest chef in the world.” Caring about family is a child’s idea of a redeeming quality for people this bad. (No wonder Cal’s lone, pointless character quirk, pretending to smoke an unlit cigarette, is lifted from the YA novel The Fault in Our Stars.) The most vibrant and complicated character in this tedious slog is probably the wallpaper. The '70s, it turns out, were better in the '70s.