Movie Review - I Care a Lot

Over a decade ago, filmmaker J Blakeson had his feature, directorial debut with the British film The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2010), one of my favorite films of that year, a nifty, crime thriller about a same-sex couple that kidnaps a woman and holds her for ransom. He got a Hollywood blockbuster to direct after that called The 5th Wave (2016), but that was adapting a novel. This film is his third feature, but his second, original screenplay that he himself is directing. His second, original screenplay turns out to be not that dissimilar from his first. It's not exactly the same, but, like his 2010 flick, a gay couple basically kidnaps a woman and holds her for ransom.

The difference is that the gay couple here aren't two men. Here, it's two women. Instead of the kidnapped woman being young and in her prime, here the kidnapped woman is elderly. Instead of the kidnapping being some violent and illegal event, here the kidnapping is actually done through legal means. If nothing else, this film demonstrates how a person can be kidnapped and have it not be illegal. In fact, the kidnappers have the cooperation of the police. This film also demonstrates how someone can grossly exploit this legal form of kidnapping for extreme financial gain. Its use of comedy, dark comedy at that, makes this somewhat of a satire, not unlike the recent Promising Young Woman (2020), The Hunt (2020), The Art of Self-Defense (2019) or even something like American Psycho (2000).

Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl and Jack Reacher) stars as Marla Grayson, the head of a company that provides legal guardians or conservatorship for elderly people. Aside from the fact that she's a lesbian who is dating a woman who works for her at her company, we don't get too much about who she is or what her back-story is. All we know is that she is the legal guardian for dozens of elderly people and she only pretends to do what the title of this film suggests. Actually, she's a con artist who feigns concern for her elderly clients when in reality she places them in a nursing home and steals their money. As their legal guardian, she has control of their finances, so she's able to steal from them without much difficulty.

The film opens though with her facing some difficulty. A relative of one of her clients is fighting her in court. Back in 2010, the U.S. Government Accountability Office or GAO, which is an agency of the U.S. Congress looked into guardian abuses in several cases and found a lack of court oversight. The opening scene here shows how Marla knows enough about the process and the trappings in order to fool the courts, even those that might be pushed to do some oversight. The film doesn't go the length of having someone go to the GAO, which could audit the situation, even if the courts were tricked. The relative in this case would have to go to his U.S. Congressman or Congresswoman in order to initiate that process. This film doesn't go there. It instead focuses on the abuses that can happen when operating on the court level, or at least that's how it starts.

Dianne Wiest (Let Them All Talk and The Birdcage) co-stars as Jennifer Peterson, the latest victim of Marla's scheme. Marla gets a recommendation from a local doctor that Jennifer is very wealthy and she has no family. Jennifer has also exhibited some signs of possible dementia. Even though she's very, very far from needing a legal guardian, Marla sees it as an opportunity to take advantage of her. Because Jennifer has no family, Marla feels that she won't have anybody to take her to court or argue for an audit. Marla then does so. She legally kidnaps Jennifer and begins to steal everything from her.

Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones and X-Men: Days of Future Past) also co-stars as a Russian gangster who is secretly related to Jennifer and realizes that Jennifer has been kidnapped. He then works to get her back and stop Marla at all costs. He even goes to very deadly degrees. He's ruthless and vicious. He's there to be a brutal antagonist and the ultimate foil to her smart and calculating nature. Marla banks on the fact that most people act emotionally and often irrationally when outsmarted through not knowing the legal process as she does. Marla doesn't react emotionally. She acts calmly and logically, without fear. She's like a shark in that regard. Dinklage's character exists to bring out her most shark-like qualities.

However, Pike's character starts out being in what could have been akin to Jennifer Lopez in Hustlers (2019) or Jessica Chastain in Molly's Game (2017). The difference is that despite the criminality in which Lopez and Chastain's characters engage, those films still managed to find a way to allow the audience to root for Lopez and Chastain's characters. Yet, if one enjoys something like American Psycho, then finding a way to root for the protagonist isn't a requirement. That 2000 film though leaned more into the ridiculous and its satirical elements. This film perhaps doesn't balance that tone properly as it feels as though it wants to be more grounded and make more of a directed statement like Nightcrawler (2014) or the recent The White Tiger (2021).

Yet, the directed statement, which presumably is about the elderly and how they can be exploited and mistreated, especially at nursing homes, that statement gets lost in the morass of watching Marla battle this Russian gangster. Strangely, Tyler Perry's A Fall From Grace (2020) does a better job of not losing that statement about elderly abuse and exploitation. Except, Perry's film was less about that issue and more about the soap opera machinations of a woman being betrayed. This film is less about that issue as well. It's instead more about watching a criminal escape another criminal after that first criminal basically robs the second criminal, which is sometimes the case in gangster or mafia films. An example of such would be the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing (1990).

It's the same for heist films. I'm reminded of something like Ocean's Eleven (2001), but the criminals in that film were going after someone who wasn't vulnerable. It never felt like it was punching down. Marla is going after vulnerable people, specifically because they're vulnerable. The point is that she's preying on the weak. There's an ease and cowardice in that, which the film never acknowledges. She's more seen as being clever, rather than a rank opportunist. Up until the Russian gangsters, she doesn't go against worthy opponents. She's not like Robin Wright's character in House of Cards (2013) or Lopez's in Hustlers. As such, I never really respected Marla as a character as I respected the characters in Hustlers or House of Cards.

Rated R for language and some violence.

Running Time: 1 hr. and 58 mins.

Available on Netflix.