I Care a Lot, written and directed by J Blakeson, is a capable crime thriller, an intermittently successful comedy, and, as the critics are paid so meagerly to “unpack” for us, a searing indictment of late capitalism.
We’ve all seen this movie. Start with some sententious voice-over about what you have to be, become, do, be willing to do, or be ready to compromise if you really want to make it in the United States. Then, show your antihero engaging in the sort of straightforwardly criminal, sociopathic activity that almost nobody has to resort to in order to make it in the U.S. Make everything look like a car commercial. Make everyone look like a real estate agent. Make them have sex on cash or cocaína or a $50,000 sofa in a mansion that looks like the bridge of a spaceship. Stylize the violence. Tack on a comeuppance, if this is a cautionary tale, or don’t, if you’re going for sophisticated pessimism.
This genre’s conventions are as rigid as a day-old John Doe, but I Care a Lot is something else as well: a horror movie. It plumbs the depths of a lesser-known species of fraud, guardianship abuse, while a court-appointed legal vampire bleeds his living ward of money, freedom, family contact, and dignity. Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike) is a professional guardian in charge of dozens of senior citizens, some of them “bought” from the unscrupulous Dr. Amos (Alicia Witt), who wields the paperwork that can turn a patient into a ward. As the film unfolds, Marla, fresh from separating a distraught son from his perfectly competent mother, negotiates with Dr. Amos for a “cherry,” a mark with loads of money and no living relatives.
What follows is a searing indictment of the modern administrative state, which sees the elderly as a burden to be warehoused and, if possible, exploited. Marla’s youth, her Anthropologie-model looks, her fashion sense, her superficial charm, her weaponized froideur, her greed, and her inhuman will to power are what entitle her to plunder and ruin decent folks in their twilight years. Yet it may be her own life the sun is setting on, because Dr. Amos’s “cherry,” Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), is, in fact, the carefully disguised mother and diamond repository of an irascible Russian gangster, Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage).
So this is a #girlboss meets #mobboss story, and the sparks will fly — mostly from Tasers, sure, but also in the mutual recognition and respect of two villains equally matched in vileness. Marla is given fair warning. First, Roman sends a lawyer (Chris Messina) to intimidate Marla cheerfully. (“[Jennifer] has very powerful friends who can make life uncomfortable for you.” “Is that a threat?” “No, no, it’s just data for you to … collate.”) Marla retaliates by stripping “Jennifer,” now installed in a care home, of her comforts. So Roman sends goons to re-kidnap his mother. This spy vs. spy routine becomes increasingly violent and preposterous until someone has to cry uncle. The film gives us to believe that that someone will never, under any circumstances, be Marla.
The suspense this battle of wills generates is less about who lives and who dies and more about the film’s persistent mystery: Who does I Care a Lot think we’re rooting for? The nightmarish scene in which Marla sweeps Jennifer from her home with smiling, bureaucratic efficiency forecloses on the possibility of identifying with Marla. With her blond bob, her vape pen, and her golden skull paperweight, Marla is an Aryan Cruella de Vil, and it only gets worse when she opens her mouth. Her social Darwinian perorations (“at heart, most of us are weak, compliant, scared”) are tedious exercises in self-justification and self-flattery. Yet the film seems to think that she’s larger than life, especially in moments like this one:
Does it sting more because I’m a woman? That you got so soundly beaten in there by someone with a vagina? Having a penis does not automatically make you more scary to me, just the opposite. You may be a man, but if you ever threaten, touch, or spit on me again, I will grab your dick and balls, and I will rip them clean off.
This sort of stuff can be hammy and embarrassing when the heroine says it. When it’s a character who defrauds old women and then taunts them about their incontinence, the feminist messaging feels a little out of place. This is, after all, a person with the Nietzschean moral imagination of a 12-year-old boy. Apart, perhaps, from the late capitalism that I Care a Lot is supposed to be satirizing, there isn’t any obvious ideological framework for admiring someone like Marla, however sharp her suits may be. At least in the old days — see, for instance, American Gangster — the bad guys gave old women Thanksgiving turkeys to buy their loyalty. Competing with men shouldn’t mean you have to become a reptile.
The movie’s effort to make Marla more sympathetic by giving her a devoted girlfriend (Eiza Gonzalez) only serves to muddy the moral septic tank, were that even possible. Who cares? Certainly not Roman, to whom it doesn’t even occur at first to threaten Marla’s partner. It’s Marla’s mother he promises to kill. That’s the worst thing he can think of, and yet she doesn’t even flinch. This is a chilling way to dramatize the attitude that old people are inconvenient, disposable.
Of course, loving his mother doesn’t make Roman the good guy. “You know,” he tells Marla, “you remind me of someone I knew when I was younger. She was fiery like you. Amusing. Uncooperative. I cut all her fingers off with a bread knife. She’s buried underneath a Jimmy John’s now.” This guy is pure malice in every scene, whether he’s nibbling an eclair, throwing a smoothie at a henchman, or (this is worth the price of admission) holding himself horizontal on the balance rings in his office. His mother, whom Wiest expertly navigates between feigned befuddlement and leonine patience, doesn’t seem too pleasant, either. If we catch ourselves hoping that they’ll open a new Jimmy John’s, so to speak, it’s because they have the decency to know what they are: not products of a system, just plain-old evil. And they still put family first.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
