Review: I Care a Lot, Before Losing the Thread, Is a Barbed Satire of Capitalism

Throughout, J Blakeson crafts sharp, curt dialogue that makes a fashion statement out of contempt.

I Care a Lot
Photo: Netflix

J Blakeson’s I Care a Lot initially cuts to the heart of one of many American sicknesses. A legal guardian, Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike), tells us at the start of the film that notions of playing fair were invented by the rich to sucker the poor, and anyone who’s paying attention understands that in our country only viciousness is rewarded. This claim serves as a screenwriter’s baldly articulated thesis while reflecting Marla’s self-rationalization as well as the simple truth. We quickly learn that Marla has concocted a scam so inventive and heartless it might even make our commander in chief blush with envy.

Working with a doctor, Amos (Alicia Witt), the head of an assisted living home, Sam Rice (Damian Young), and a clueless judge, Lomax (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), Marla conspires to have aging people falsely declared mentally incompetent so that she may become their legal guardian, imprison them in the home, and gradually liquefy their belongings, from which she takes a large cut. Blakeson’s script initially mines our fears of exploitation, giddily indicting a national health care system that serves as a huge, faceless, unsympathetic profit center that intersects with other profit centers such as the judiciary and incarceration systems. Marla clearly feels that her elderly targets are going to be fucked over anyway, so why not grab a piece for herself, prying it away from an infrastructural monolith?

Blakeson crafts sharp, curt dialogue that makes a fashion statement out of contempt, and it’s particularly nightmarish to see chic, slick Marla ransack the home like some yuppie conqueror or vampire. Marla represents the zero-sum mentality of capitalism, but she’s also meant to suggest fear of castration. She emasculates the unkempt (read: beta) son of one of her charges early on, and continues to confront and outwit men on various rungs of the social ladder (one of whom is played with indelible sleaze by Chris Messina), until finally meeting one who matches or exceeds her ruthlessness: a mysterious gangster named Roman (Peter Dinklage).

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Roman’s entrance into the film represents a disappointment and a coup. As Marla and Roman go to war over the fate of Marla’s recent victim, Jennifer Preston (Dianne Wiest), I Care a Lot drifts toward escalating and increasingly conventional acts of thriller-movie cruelty. However, Blakeson springs a good sick joke with Roman, as this sex-trafficking, murdering outlaw scans as a more sympathetic antihero than Marla. Roman, in his attachment to Jennifer, who’s been mercilessly tormented by Marla, occasionally displays recognizable emotions, while Marla remains mercenary until I Care a Lot goes soft in the last act.

Marla nevertheless grows tedious, as filmmakers have become too comfortable utilizing Pike as an embodiment of suppressed female wrath. The scenes meant to indicate that Marla is capable of vulnerability, opposite her equally ruthless associate and lover, Fran (Eiza González), are perfunctory, while Roman’s rage and desperation deepen his stature, allowing him to arise as a monster with a degree of pathos. Perhaps Dinklage is more capable of surprising us than Pike, investing mundane commands (like “make it look organic”) with weirdly poignant comic menace. Marla doesn’t even flinch when she’s on the verge of being tortured to death, and she eventually becomes an action hero by the dictates of the plot—a white-collar crook who can turn ridiculously on a dime into a blue-collar bad ass.

Quoting Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 2, it appears that Blakeson means for us to champion Marla as a feminist icon for a while, though he deflates this potential moral idiocy with an ironic ending. Blakeson does lose track of the health-care hook, though, to the point that Jennifer, who’s played cunningly by Wiest, is essentially forgotten. Of course, the notion of an elderly person locked away, invisible, while younger people eat one another alive for her spoils is certainly resonant in its own right.

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Score: 
 Cast: Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage, Eiza González, Dianne Wiest, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Macon Blair, Alicia Witt, Damian Young, Nicholas Logan, Liz Eng, Celeste Oliva, Georgia Lyman, Moira Driscoll, Chris Messina  Director: J Blakeson  Screenwriter: J Blakeson  Distributor: Netflix  Running Time: 118 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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