I’m Your Woman Parent Guide

For Jean (Rachel Brosnahan), being married to a career criminal has its advantages: a nice house, fancy clothing, and a mysterious baby, since she can’t have her own. But the downsides are a little steeper. When her husband Eddie (Bill Heck) falls afoul of his more dangerous associates, he sends Cal (Arinze Kene) to help Jean disappear. With baby Harry (Justin and Jameson Charles, Barrett Shaffer) in tow, the two take off on a road trip to save their lives. Now Jean can’t help but wonder what’s happened to Eddie, and no one seems able or willing to tell her…

I’m Your Woman suffers from a major pacing problem. There are little hotspots of action and intrigue which are little more than punctuation in a tome composed mostly of the routine day-to-day tasks of looking after a baby. Yes, there’s tension in the background – but for the first two acts, the background is pretty much where it stays. Things do pick up a little after that, which is good, except that by this point the movie’s been running for over an hour, and my patience has long since run out.

The other big problem with the flick is that the screenwriters were apparently unable to write a character who isn’t made of balsa wood. I don’t think it’s an acting problem because it appears to be universal – I think this is a script issue and a directing issue. Again, things improve marginally in the third act, but the first two are dry, stiff, and wooden. You could chop this movie up and build a log cabin with it, and probably a pretty warm one at that.

On the other hand, boring in this case also means remarkably clean. There are shootings, but for an R-rated movie, there are surprisingly few of them and those that are shown are fairly tidy. Crime films are notorious for high volume profanity, but this one limits itself to a comparatively minimal number of sexual expletives. Smoking and drinking occur but only in the background, which is also atypical of the genre.

As I’ve pointed out before, inoffensive does not mean good. Maybe it’s just my own personal lack of sleep, but this movie seemed determined to lull me into a good long nap. It’s not that I hate the characters or the premise, and I’m certain there’s a more interesting way to tell this story, somehow. Until they figure that out, though, there aren’t a lot of good reasons to sit through two hours of this.