The cool thing about the American healthcare system is the way it is completely fucked for everyone in different ways. For the sick, exorbitant costs meet insurance companies eager to deny care. The employed either don’t get insurance and sick leave, or have to live in fear of losing it on a boss’ whim. Employers have to offer staggeringly expensive plans to lure in talent. And the elderly? Well, for one example of what we do to the elderly, you could watch the new Netflix Original film, I Care A Lot.
“Well, to make it in this country, you need to be brave.”
Marla Grayson cares. Professionally. Exploiting a loophole in the legal system that allows for strangers to come in and take control of the lives and finances of an elderly person, Marla runs a tight, predatory ship. Along with her lover, Fran, she manages the lives of dozens of strangers. She robs them blind, strips them of their dignity, and it is all completely legal. Indeed, the courts are a shield for Marla and her business.
After one of her victims dies unexpectedly, she gets a golden opportunity: Jennifer Peterson. She’s old. She’s rich. And most importantly, she has no children. She’s a “cherry,” the perfect mark. Or so she thinks.
Marla moves quickly. She takes control of Jennifer’s home and has her imprisoned in an elder care facility. Stripped of her ability to communicate and with no legal control over her own life, it seems like the perfect crime. But Jennifer has a secret. Her son isn’t dead. Her son is actually a very dangerous man. And now Marla is square in his sights.
“And stupid, and ruthless, and focused.”
There’s a steely reserve to Rosamund Pike that many of her films test but few get right. I mean, her huge breakout performance was as one of the steeliest characters in modern cinema, Gone Girl‘s Amy Dunne. Since then, she’s played inventors, war correspondents, pioneer settlers, but none of them have given her as much leeway to really dig in and steal the show as Amy. I Care A Lot is transparently an attempt to recreate that magic. It’s a testament to Pike’s talents that it mostly works! She has a slick, brutal charisma here that I couldn’t look away from, no matter how repugnant she got.
There’s something that happens to TV actors who gives steely, memorable dramatic performances. I don’t know why, but they all gravitate towards quirky heavies. Fresh off a career-making turn in Game of Thrones, Peter Dinklage is no exception. Dinklage’s Roman is… a character. I respect that writer/director J Blakeson wanted to give Roman some quirks, but “office gymnastics” and “menacing pastries” are big choices that the movie doesn’t really earn. Something Game of Thrones understood early on is that Dinklage is a mesmerizing performer. He’s at his best when he can just talk. Roman works best in those moments, which to be fair makes up most of his screen time. He overpowers a potentially quirky character and manages to make something memorable.
The bit parts, played by Chris Messina, Damian Young, Isiah Whitlock Jr, they’re all good, flavorful small roles. Eiza González is charmingly amoral in an unfortunately slight role as Marla’s assistant and lover. And Dianne Wiest gets even less to do as the dazed figure of Marla’s latest scam. These two stand out to me as characters who deserve a more robust role that they don’t get. Not just because I want to see more of them, but because they’re a key piece of the story that went tragically unexamined.
“Because playing fair, being scared, that gets you nowhere.”
I Care A Lot is about capitalism. Look, I know I say that all the time, but this time it’s true. Marla wants. She is, to steal an Econ 101 term, homo economicus. Her goal, her only goal, is to maximize her profit-making capabilities. At the start of the film, she feels like an everyday grifter in senselessly over her head. But understanding her as homo economicus makes it easier to grasp her decisions when the shit hits the fan. Especially since, as with The Wolf of Wall Street, the movie doesn’t really overtly critique Marla. She is our narrator, and the way the film is shot is meant to put us on her side.
But Wolf used sharp editing to tell the story we weren’t seeing. We see the pursuit of Naomi, but not the relationship’s collapse. The birth of his child isn’t worth mentioning really, only when Naomi tries to take something Jordan sees as his. In other words, Scorsese never lets us totally forget that the story Jordan chooses to tell sees other people as props. Wolf of Wall Street was about the way money dehumanizes people; I Care A Lot is about Marla. One is a more systemic critique, while the other is a personal one.
I Care A Lot is sloppier. It wants to tell that bigger story. Unfortunately, it also wants to be a fun cat-and-mouse thriller between Pike and Dinklage. Because of that, it forgets anyone else exists. Dianne Weist’s Jennifer initially seems like an antagonist in her own right, but as soon as Peter Dinklage arrives, she is shuffled offscreen for the rest of the film. When I compare this to Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, for example, another thriller about the way for-profit healthcare incentivizes monstrous things, the difference becomes stark. Unsane followed a patient into the belly of the beast, while I Care A Lot forgets about the patients as soon as they appear.
Without a view of the real human suffering Marla’s actions cause in one way or another, the critique rings hollow.
“That gets you beat.”
I Care A Lot gets a lot right. The cast is perfect, particularly the two leads. The ending is strong, crystallizing the film’s themes and finally reminding us of the consequences of Marla’s actions. But the movie needed that reminder. Because, ultimately, the movie forgot all about the actual human beings for most of the runtime. It felt like the movie realized it had lost track of the idea that this is Bad, Actually and needed to shock us into remembering. But it also felt meaningless. The character reminding us of Marla’s dark deeds is no one; his story is nothing.
It’s easy to get seduced by the film’s more exciting elements. There are some genuinely great twists in this. A decent cat-and-mouse crime thriller is tough to manage, and J Blakeson mostly gets it right here. But in doing so, he got seduced by the film’s more exciting elements. He lost track of what the movie was about, or never figured out how to merge two different ideas. I Care A Lot is interesting, but it lost focus — and to a degree, lost the point.