Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 58 minutes
Director: J. Blakeson
Quick Impressions:
I’m dying to see Nomadland, but we skipped date night this week because we were preoccupied, trying to process what on earth happened to us at the beginning of the week when we lost power for 59 hours in the middle of sometimes single-digit temperatures, sometimes snow and ice, sometimes running water. All in all, it’s been a very strange several days here in Central Texas.
I wasn’t going to review a movie at all this week, but then I saw that I Care A Lot had premiered on Netflix. I’ve been vaguely curious about that one since Rosamund Pike’s Golden Globe nomination. I’ve always liked her, and on paper, the character she plays in this film sounds so similar to Amy Dunne in Gone Girl (maybe a touch more sinister) that I was sure I would enjoy her performance. And I did. I also assumed that the film’s darkly comic tone and likable supporting cast (Peter Dinklage, Dianne Wiest) would make the movie fun to watch with the family. But it wasn’t. (By “the family,” I mean my daughter and my father as well as my husband. Obviously my five-year-old wasn’t interested.)
At any rate, this movie proved a more stressful watch than I had hoped. My husband found the last third particularly hard to endure. After this week, we don’t need to watch a movie to be reminded that callous, unfeeling, immoral pursuit of profit at the expense of others’ well being exists in this world.
Rosamund Pike does give a good performance, though. I mean, it’s a genuinely good performance, despite the fact that it’s been nominated by the always whimsical Golden Globes. I wouldn’t be upset to see her get an Oscar nomination (though I doubt she will).
The Good:
This film has some twists and turns, and I don’t want to spoil any of the surprises (though for the most part they’re pretty easy to call. In fact, disconcertingly, the part of the movie that is hardest to predict is also the least fun to watch).
What I can say without spoilers is that when I finished watching I Care A Lot, I immediately thought of another film, Mutiny on the Bounty.
My daughter and I watched the classic, Best Picture winning 1935 version just a few months ago, so the plot of the film is fresh in my mind. Early on Charles Laughton’s Captain Bligh is the most unlikable character imaginable. An unrepentant sadist, he takes discipline aboard the H.M.S. Bounty to unnecessary heights (like the top of the crow’s nest, where he forces one officer to ride out a violent thunderstorm in punishment for a minor infraction). Liberal with the lash, keen on keelhauling, Bligh loves to dish out punishments. If there’s a way to be cruel to sailors, you can bet he finds it.
So you go through the first two-thirds of the movie hating this guy’s rotten guts and looking forward to his comeuppance (which you know is coming because “mutiny” is the first word in the title).
But late in the movie, something shocking happens. After a reversal of fortune (and it’s probably not much of a spoiler to say it’s a mutiny on the Bounty), Bligh is placed in an extreme, life-threatening situation. They’ve already traveled around the Horn of Africa, and they’re way out in the middle of nowhere in choppy waters full of storms so dangerous they almost wrecked the Bounty. The sailors throw Bligh and a handful of loyal officers to sea in a tiny rowboat. Unrepentant and vengeful, the captain curses them and vows to rows that boat to Timor, return to England, and see them all hanged.
And then he does it! In a rowboat! He makes it back to England and has them all arrested. It was the most spectacular feat of sailing and sheer, ornery willpower I have ever seen.
And you see, at that point, just because I was so blown over by this astonishing, impossible thing he accomplished, I had to start rooting for Captain Bligh. I had spent the whole movie loathing this guy (and not for no reason), but once he pulled off a crazy stunt like that, I couldn’t help but respect him. It was the best thing about the movie. It was amazing!
But, then, of course, at the end of the movie, the judge reminds us all that Captain Bligh, though an astonishing sailor, really is a rotten, sadistic jerk. And that leaves you feeling a bit icky. You can’t root for Captain Bligh anymore. He is evil. But the other characters are all vaguely boring. So…?
With no spoilers, I can say that this movie is exactly like that.
Rosamund Pike’s character is pretty much a sociopath. Anyone with a traditional moral make-up would call her evil. (It doesn’t matter how you define good. She’s evil. And she’s the worst kind of evil, lawful evil.) (Well, maybe she’s neutral evil. But she’s made a very lucrative career of using the law to her advantage.)
She has the world’s most loathsome profession. She’s a court-appointed legal guardian to senior citizens deemed unfit to care for themselves. She uses this position to gain control of their assets, then spends their money on what she deems necessary, i.e. herself. And she has a whole racket going, hand-picking vulnerable targets with the help of crooked doctors and nursing home officials (and one woefully deceived judge, who comes across as such a compassionate, decent man). Often these people aren’t even unable to care for themselves! She’s an expert at railroading court orders through the system and basically kidnapping these poor people, robbing them blind, stealing even their autonomy.
Marla is loathsome, and she’s admittedly, unabashedly committed to her immoral (maybe more accurately amoral) schemes. She does some narration for us at the beginning, revealing her interior world and her life goals, so there’s absolutely no mistake. She’s committed to making money and has no regard for human suffering. Frankly, it’s disturbing to think that people like this could exist.
Pike is fantastic in the role. She always plays this sort of character particularly well. And to do justice to Marla, she has to commit to an almost ridiculous level of sociopathic determination. Single-minded and genuinely impossible to scare, Marla thinks of nothing but her goals and never stops until she gets what she wants. Marla commits to her schemes, and Pike commits to Marla. It is a very good performance.
The supporting cast is good, too. I always like Peter Dinklage and Dianne Wiest, but my favorite supporting performances come from Chris Messina as a slick lawyer and Eiza González as Marla’s partner (in business, crime, love, and life) Fran. I probably liked Fran far, far more than she deserves. She’s leading a reprehensible life herself, actively complicit in every one of Marla’s distasteful schemes. But for some reason, I liked her. Maybe it’s that she’s incredibly loyal and her feelings for Marla seem so genuine and unshakable. (But I don’t know why you should get points for loving someone if that person is evil.) And my heart broke for Isiah Whitlock, Jr.’s character, an honest judge, unknowingly complicit in so many unconscionable acts.
Best Scene:
My favorite scene by far is the charged conversation between Marla and Chris Messina’s Dean Ericson. He delivers his smiling threats perfectly, and the way she reacts…is really something else. Their surprise meeting in Marla’s office is actually fun to watch.
Best Action Sequence:
That part in the car is pretty much the equivalent of Captain Bligh in the rowboat. I found myself rooting for someone who did not deserve my support. But how can you not root for someone under those circumstances? Also movies seldom improve if the most interesting character is abruptly removed from them.
Best Scene Visually:
I didn’t particularly notice the cinematography in this movie. The image I’ll take with me is a human tooth in a jug of milk.
Most Oscar-Worthy Moment, Rosamund Pike:
If I were picking an Oscar clip for Pike, I’d use her late-night conversation with Peter Dinklage’s character in which she reveals her feelings for her mother. At this point, I became absolutely certain that there was only one way the relationship between these two characters could end. I don’t believe that Pike will get an Oscar nomination, but she is winningly intense as an apparent sociopath who only doubles down in the face of grave danger.
The Negatives:
I hate movies that spoon feed the audience a heavy-handed moral, but this one goes too far the other way. I’m honestly not sure what I’m supposed to come away thinking.
Certainly some viewers will find the film frustrating. I would say that I’m one of them, but at a certain point near the end of the film, my husband smacked the couch and looked ready to explode. I’m pretty sure that had we not been sitting on that couch at the time, he would have hurled the entire thing at the TV screen. It’s the most rage I’ve ever seen anything we’ve watched inspire in him. Back when we fanatically played Fantasy Football, I would occasionally get worked up like that (okay, not occasionally, a lot) but my husband, never. So in the face of his frustration, my own seems greatly diminished.
Of course, part of his rage stems from the injustice we just experienced in our own lives this week as ERCOT deliberately cut power to millions of Texans for days at a time when it was six degrees outside. (That was the acceptable solution.) We were one of those households, but we were comparatively lucky with plenty of blankets and canned food. Such atrocious things happened to so many people here! Every new account I hear (from friends and news sources) of children freezing to death in their beds, the elderly suffering, hospitals losing power and water for extended periods angers me more and more. Foremost in our minds right now is the idea that some people will continue to exploit others for profit and will likely neither face severe consequences nor care about the suffering they have caused. So to watch a sociopathic protagonist exploit people again and again while escaping any meaningful punishment is very triggering at the moment.
As my husband said after the film, “It’s enraging because I feel like it mimics real life too much.”
Also, if you ask me, the movie is too predictable. Despite its twists and turns, most big plot points are pretty easy to call. In fact, two of the biggest developments late in the film, I literally called out loud. As my last prediction came true at the end of the movie, I joked, “I secretly wrote this film.” (I realize that saying that is also obnoxiously unoriginal, but you have to keep in mind that big twists in movies often take me totally by surprise because I get so sucked into following the characters. I was surprised when what had seemed so obvious to me actually happened. I’m often wrong.)
For a movie that works hard (for a while) to give us unexpected twists and turns, that ending is pretty uninspired. It’s too clichéd and a little flat.
So my husband found the movie frustrating because the corruption he saw on screen seemed too real. For me, perhaps a greater problem is that large stretches of the film seem too unrealistic. With no spoilers, I can say that some of the characters in the film are the worst and most ineffective at their jobs of anyone I have ever seen in their career. (Granted, I really only know such people’s work through cinema. And I don’t want to spoil the film. But let’s just say that if these guys were thieves, they would be Harry and Marv from Home Alone.) I frankly don’t believe that a certain character could pull off the things achieved in this movie in real life. I find it almost distractingly improbable. (Imagine this person as Kevin in Home Alone.) I know the movie is a comedy, but in the last act of the film, the events become so unlikely that the movie is neither funny nor suspenseful. It’s just morally confusing. (Or, if you’re my usually mild-mannered husband, enraging.)
By the end, I could imagine no conclusion that would be satisfying, no finish that would pack a satisfactory emotional punch. Now in fairness, the film is about a sociopath, someone who probably doesn’t experience the usual resonant highs and lows (and depth) of feeling. The central character’s experience of life is probably a bit shallow, a bit flat, and the film begins to feel a bit shallow, a bit flat, as well. I couldn’t make up my mind whom to root for, and I found I didn’t really care too much what happened to anybody by the end.
In the beginning, I craved the satisfaction of seeing a certain person punished. But in the last act, I realized I no longer felt that urge, possibly because even if the punishment came, it would no longer be satisfying. Also, movies already floundering really stop being good if you remove the most interesting character. So I was put in the awkward position of rooting hard for someone I despised, mostly because I just didn’t want the movie to get boring. But I already knew that two big things would probably happen, and sure enough, they did.
So the movie starts off fairly strong but loses steam when it becomes impossible to root for anyone wholeheartedly. Some people are so immoral; others are so incompetent. I’ve seen and liked films in the past that follow the misadventures of a bunch of seeming sociopaths. This one just falls flat.
But by far the film’s biggest flaw is the sudden disappearance of Dianne Wiest. She gives a great supporting performance. Her character is compelling, genuinely interesting, and I love the way she changes as the story progresses. But then she just disappears, just vanishes. I mean, in terms of the plot, we know where the character is. But where she should be is more involved in the action. She’s too much of a presence initially to stop being of any consequence and just fade away from the movie. That’s quite disappointing. For one thing, at a certain point, I got fed up with everyone else. They were all either incompetent or evil. Wiest’s character still seemed sympathetic to me. If anybody was going to do something to create a resonant emotional beat at the end of the story, it had to be her. But she was just gone. (That’s how I predicted the last big thing that would happen. It was pretty much the only thing left that could happen! I mean there has to be a definitive ending. The film can’t just vaguely drift on forever.)
It’s hard not to think this film wanted to feel more important at the end than it does. It’s clearly trying to be fun and twisty while making a statement. But the statement just ends up being, “The world is full of corrupt, heartless people, and no matter what you do, you can never make them care.” And that’s no fun! In this movie, our perceptions continually shift. Who is the victim? Who is the villain? But in the end, all the characters just kind of suck. I suppose the lesson to be learned here is that people with nothing to lose are the most to be feared. Or maybe the lesson is that Rosamund Pike plays sociopaths so well that she should be offered more parts like this in the future. That’s probably it.
Overall:
In I Care A Lot, Rosamund Pike gives an excellent performance as a horrible person. Unfortunately, she doesn’t actually care a lot, and by the end, neither did I. Still, if you already pay for Netflix, the movie is worth seeing for Pike’s commanding performance as the seemingly sociopathic Marla. Just don’t watch this movie while you’re mad about the injustice of the world. It will only make you angrier!