'I'm Your Woman'

Much like a dead body, or a complicating disability, babies present a thorny narrative conundrum for screenplay writers: Are they realistically burdensome, crying much of the time -- all day, much of the night, and especially when trying to hide from an intruder in the house? Or are they a fantasia element, sweetly benevolent, easily amused, and ready for cute close-ups whenever called upon?

More often than not, writers employ what might be called a "standard cheat," in which a baby appears, becomes a factor when the plot demands it, and readily recedes into the background when the adults need to talk about serious matters. Their impact is mitigated by their eventual lack of screen time -- parents everywhere remember what it was like to have a wailing baby disrupting their existence, everyone else gets the picture -- allowing the plot mechanics to take place, freed from their tiny, diaper-filling constraints.

In contrast to this relatively easy approach, Harry (Jameson and Justin Charles), the featured infant in Julia Hart's '70s-era quasi-crime drama "I'm Your Woman," makes his presence known throughout the proceedings, save for the violent finale, which in of itself speaks to the lengths Hart and co-screenwriter Jordan Horowitz are willing to go in order to give their off-speed pitch of a film a palpable sense of, if not "realism," at least, the lack of obvious shortcutting.

Harry is presented to Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) one day without fanfare, by her shady husband Eddie (Bill Heck). Unable to have a child of her own, Jean is thrilled and somewhat terrified at the prospect of a kid suddenly placed in her lap, especially as he comes without explanation, other than her husband assuring her "it's all taken care of."

Jean doesn't get to worry about it for terribly long before she's suddenly woken up in the middle of the night by an associate of Eddie's, who rushes her and the baby out of the house, and off with a man named Cal (Arinzé Kene), whom she has never met. Thoroughly confused, and scared for her husband, Jean has little choice but to dutifully follow orders, as Cal eventually gets her to something of a safehouse, where she is left alone with the baby, a stocked refrigerator, a phone number to call if she's in trouble, and a duffel bag with about $200K in it, grabbed from her and Eddie's closet.

Being left alone in an unfamiliar house, trapped with a baby she barely knows, and no earthly idea of how she's going to make it through the afternoon, let alone the days after, Jean's situation becomes a perfect emulation of the similar sort of terror new parents feel the first day home from the hospital with their mewling newborn in tow.

After a near fatal encounter occurs at this location, Cal has to whisk her away again, this time to his childhood cabin out in the Pennsylvania countryside, where Jean eventually meets Cal's wife, Teri (Marsha Stephanie Blake), father, Art (Frankie Faison), and adolescent son, Paul (De'Mauri Parks), all of whom are now under the same threat of danger in which Jean has unwittingly found herself.

It seems as if the impetuous Eddie, part of a crime syndicate, has gone and killed one of the big bosses, which has turned everything to bloody chaos, leaving various factions of thugs looking for Jean in order to locate her hubristic husband, presumably laying low in an unknown location.

One thing Hart and Horowitz's screenplay ably accomplishes is to keep the audience as much in dark about the particulars of what's happening as Jean, making it so nearly anything can potentially be a threat to her, from a seemingly kindly neighbor offering her a welcome-to-the-neighborhood pot of planted daisies, to a car suddenly appearing in her rearview mirror.

Through it all, the film's oddball pacing consistently throws the genre standards out of whack -- this might be the rare example of a crime flick in which the cleaning up and staging of a crime scene gets more of a film's focus than the violence that necessitated it -- which gives it a jolt of off-kilter energy. Things happen slowly, and then all of a sudden, but not in the normal build-to-climax way to which we've all become accustomed, even for an indie effort such as this. When Art shows Jean how to shoot a gun in the woods, aiming for a can on a stump, she shoots, recoils, and misses three times, the scene ending without the anticipated satisfaction of her finally nailing it.

There are also good tidbits of character work liberally sprinkled throughout, including the fact that Jean is such an admittedly terrible cook, she didn't even realize it was an option to add salt and pepper to a can of cooked peas. Much of what we can glean from the plot, since so much of it happens offscreen and remains unknown, comes from Jean's surprisingly adept deductive reasoning (she connects Cal's healthy attempts at smoking an unlit cigarette to the idea that someone who cares about him must have asked him to do so, for example), and an attention to detail that rewards the careful viewer.

When it clicks, it can offer you slightly different perspectives on a well-worn sort of genre, but it doesn't always work as intended. Since we know so little of what's happening or why, we're not given much reason to care about the pile-up of bodies that eventually accumulate around our protagonists -- we know so little about Eddie, for example, and his relationship with Jean, his fate doesn't resonate -- and the screenplay adheres to a defiantly rosy outlook when the bullets have finally stopped whizzing around.

Still, as optimistic as it might remain, it keeps baby Harry more or less suitably baby-like, which gives Jean, by the end, the familiarly haunted look of the young, sleepless parent. One who realizes, far too late, that what they inadvertently signed up for has turned out to be less a beatific time with one's newborn, and more a brutal bootcamp of helpless frustration and sleepless mental disintegration.