A legal guardian's scam, which involves placing elderly people into her
care and stripping their assets, sees her make a dangerous enemy.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: J Blakeson
Starring: Rosamund Pike, Eiza Gonzalez, Dianne Wiest, Peter Dinklage, Chris Messina, Macon Blair, Alicia Witt, Damian Young, Isiah Whitlock
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Writer/director J Blakeson's I Care a Lot is a
completely original creation, yet it often feels like a neutered, toothless
American remake of some savage piece of satire from Korea or Scandinavia.
Its setup is so juicy that you might assume someone somewhere must have come
up with this idea already, and surely they made a better fist of it than
Blakeson?
The setup really is the definition of "high concept."
Rosamund Pike is Marla Grayson, a potentially iconic villain who runs
a despicable scam whereby with the assistance of various other crooked
professionals, she has elderly people declared incompetent and appointed to
her care as legal guardian. While her victims are confined to nursing homes,
Marla and her lover Fran (Eiza González) strip their assets.
Marla believes she has found a perfect victim in the form of Jennifer
Peterson (Dianne Wiest), a retired woman who appears to have no
family. But once Jennifer is caged in a retirement home, Marla learns that
her latest dupe is secretly the mother of notorious mobster Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage), who will stop at nothing to free his mom from Marla's clutches.
All the ingredients are in place for a black as night comedy, and initially
I Care a Lot appears to be aiming for something close to
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with its tale of a reprehensible con
artist finally meeting their match. Sporting a bob cut so sharp it must have
left her shoulders scarred, Pike is ideally cast as the sociopathic ice
queen and there's fun to be had in watching her revel in her character's
nastiness. Women rarely get to be assholes in mainstream American movies
now, and lesbians never get to be assholes, so it's refreshing to see a very
modern take on the sort of role Barbara Stanwyck might have played had this
been made in the 1930s.
But after the opening act, I Care a Lot switches gears and
becomes a rather straight thriller, albeit one that visually resembles a
comedy, with characters sporting eye-popping fashions against primary
coloured backdrops. The potentially tasty battle of wits between Pike's
Marla and Wiest's Jennifer is quickly tossed aside as Dinklage's generic
gangster takes centre stage instead. There are a couple of confrontations
between Pike and Wiest that hint at the far more involving movie this might
have been, with both actresses at the top of their game, but Wiest soon
disappears, the film ironically doing to the veteran actress what Marla does
to Jennifer. Instead we're left to watch blandly written confrontations
between Roman and Marla that play like outtakes from some awful '90s
Tarantino knockoff.
The main problem with I Care a Lot is that it gives us a
protagonist whose actions are so unforgivably callous that it presents a
real challenge to a filmmaker to get us on their side. I get the feeling
that Blakeson thinks he's making some sort of feminist statement here, and
that we'll side with Marla against Roman simply because she's a woman, and a
lesbian to boot. It says a lot about America's twisted morality that a movie
posits a drug dealer as a greater evil than someone who essentially kidnaps
and gaslights old people in order to steal their money. Of course, awful
people can make for great protagonists, but given her actions, Marla needs
to be a hell of a lot more charismatic than the one-note ice maiden we're
presented with here. As you can probably tell, I didn't care a lot for I Care a Lot, but I would certainly watch a Korean or Scandinavian remake.
