I Care A Lot (2021): Written and directed by J Blakeson. Starring: Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage, Eiza Gonzalez, Chris Messina, and Dianne Wiest. Running Time: 118 minutes.
Rating: 3/4
I couldn't help but be repeatedly reminded of Gone Girl while watching Rosamund Pike's character be pulled ever-deeper into a web of conspiracy, deviance, and amoral depravity as she tries to keep her life of scams afloat. In all other respects these two films are barely comparable, but Pike's performance in both are mirror images of each other as she yanks the viewer into the tangled machinations of a complete and utter sociopath. Unlike in Gone Girl, however, where she shares lead billing with Ben Affleck, here she's working opposite Peter Dinklage, which for my money is a significant upgrade.
Inspired by a smattering of real-life stories, Marla Grayson heads a small yet massively corrupt circle of doctors and retirement home managers who regularly conspire to get Marla legal guardianship of the old and mentally ill so as to slowly leech them of all their material wealth before they croak. It is brutal, shockingly cold-blooded and wholly amoral. Therefore, it is the perfect distillment of 21st-century American capitalism. We have all this set up for us in a remarkably economic opening, one that uses sharp contrasts between the earnest, heartfelt tones Marla applies in the courtroom to gain custody over people with a literal Victims Wall in her office, where headshots of her "wards" are added and removed like hunting targets.
The delicate balancing act that allows her and her colleagues-in-crime to skirt just around the right side of the law is very, very brutally blasted apart when she finally picks the wrong target. In her search for a "cherry," she discovers an elderly woman who seems remarkably wealthy, but with no clear friends of family around to care about an inheritance once she's gone. She soons find out that this identity is nothing more than a front, and soon the goons of one Roman Lunyov, Peter Dinklage's reclusive crime boss and the apparent son of the disappeared lady, start hounding her, her girlfriend, and everyone she's ever worked with, determined to force her to give up custodianship of the woman or literally kill her trying.
As is to be expected, Pike is absolutely amazing in her role, shining even in some later scenes where the script suddenly starts giving her less to work with. The movie comes up very close to the edge of glorifying, or at least being an apologist for, the ego-driven cruelty that drives Marla, but there are a few key moments that reassured me the movie wasn't quite that nihilistic. Still, this is a hell of a ride, and even when the plot starts to jump the shark a bit in the final act and breaks away from the frightening realism that makes the first half of the movie so guttingly effective, it remains incredibly entertaining right up to the end.
As great as she is, though, Dinklage matches her in every scene and brings the lumber portraying a former mob boss who is trying, maybe, to leave the life behind and just live in peace. There is a quiet hilarity in how increasingly furious he gets that this knucke-headed care worker won't just take a wad of money offered to her, give him his mother back, and leave them all the fuck alone. Even as the wire this is all balancing on starts to fray towards the end, both of these characters remain entertaining enough to want to stick around and see what happens.
All in all, this is a finely-acted and mostly well-made thriller, albeit one that will not blow the mind of any aficionados of this particular genre. If nothing else, it left me all the more determined to keep care of my parents within the family when the time comes.
-Noah
