“It’s your baby,” says mobster Eddie (Bill Heck), inexplicably plonking a strange crying infant into the lap of his wife, Jean (The Marvelous Mrs Maisel’s Rachel Brosnahan), before promptly disappearing. Rather than be implicated in his evident wrongdoings, Jean and baby have to hit the road, chauffeured by Eddie’s former associate Cal (Arinzé Kene). Jean’s hexagonal sunglasses, perhaps a nod to Gena Rowlands’s in Minnie and Moskowitz, indicate the early-70s setting. But this crime thriller is not a traditional period piece – by putting Eddie’s wife centre stage rather than the gangster himself, director Julia Hart suggests revisionist intentions.
With no husband to protect her and a child in her charge, the passive Jean must snap into survival mode. Her privilege comes into sharper focus, too. “It’s worse for us because we have a kid,” she complains. “Nothing’s worse for you,” replies Cal’s wife, Teri (a scene-stealing Marsha Stephanie Blake). Reorienting a typically white male genre around themes of feminist awakening and racial tension is an intriguing proposition, so it’s frustrating that Brosnahan remains blank and the film’s pace plodding.
