In a case of one of those movies where we’re meant to focus on the message instead of the various sharp detours away from plausibility, I Care A Lot centers on the power haircut that is Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike, never one to shy away from a double-crossing role). Having established the perfect con operation of getting a Massachusetts judge to believe her every time she comes to him with the “proof” that an elderly person is incapable of taking care of themselves, Marla has quite an enterprise. One that she operates with the help of her criminal-savvy, police-connected girlfriend, Fran (Eiza González).
Together, the duo is unstoppable, especially since they’re in cahoots with a doctor named Karen Amos (Alicia Witth). With her help, plenty of vulnerable patients are funneled Marla’s way. The sort of patients who can be taken advantage of to the utmost life-ruining capacity with the mere flick of a doctor’s pen citing their inability to take care of themselves. Once that happens, Marla is in charge of every aspect of their lives, burying them in a care home, doping them up with the help of the facility’s director, Sam Rice (Damian Young), and cutting off their communication to any family members. It’s the stuff of geriatric nightmares, and while it’s not out of the realm of possibility (with scams targeted against the elderly soaring most recently online post-corona), Blakeson plays it up to cartoonish effect for the purposes of this “thriller” with a tone that borders at times on satire.
An unexpected “vacancy” in Marla’s coterie of clients (a.k.a. the guy dies way sooner than she thought at sixty-nine) prompts Karen to recommend a “cherry”–a woman with no messy complications of having any family. No husband (not even ex-), no kids, no nothing. Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest) doesn’t even have so much as a missed payment in her history. And she’s got good money, to further add to her allure. After being brought to Marla’s attention, Jennifer doesn’t have a prayer. Yet we have to ask, would a woman like Jennifer, so careful about who she interacts with and concealing her identity, even bother with a normal doctor who wasn’t “in the circle” we’re about to discover she’s a part of?
With Karen’s help, they get an emergency court order without Jennifer being present that enables Marla to become her guardian. Considering how chic the topic of conservator/guardianships has become in the wake of Framing Britney Spears stoking public interest in the matter once more, I Care A Lot also seems to be undercuttingly forewarning those who come after the baby boomers what might happen to them if there isn’t some amendment to the oversweeping legality of how this “position” works. That is, in such a way to make it all too easy for the unscrupulous likes of Marla to take advantage and work the system. But as she says at the beginning, “Look at you. Sitting there. You think you’re good people. You’re not good people. Trust me. There’s no such thing as good people. I used to be like you. Thinking that working hard and playing fair would lead to success and happiness. It doesn’t. Playing fair is a joke invented by rich people to keep the rest of us poor.”
Marla seems to have learned this after trying to play fair at the “American dream” with a prior business that was aboveboard. As Pike explained of Marla’s backstory (which makes her ever-present vape pen all the more relevant), “…she had a vape business until she was Walmart-ed out of business by a great big discount vape store opening across the street, which she was furious about. I think that was her shot at the American dream played fair… she got screwed and then she thought, ‘Right. Chips are down. I’m going all out. I’m gonna play the system like everybody else.’ And I think every time she inhales, it’s bringing that attitude to it. It’s the attitude of having been screwed and now you’re out to screw everybody.”
Blakeson, being British, surely knows something about the rigged nature of class, playing it up in the American version of the wealth and power game for the purposes of ripping apart the concept of the American dream. This, indeed, is a term that gets referenced more than once in not even sardonically referring to the fact that if anyone wants to achieve it, they have to be willing to do some morally reprehensible things. But what Marla didn’t bargain for is that Jennifer isn’t the naive old lady she was led to believe. Indeed, some very powerful people are working to free her from the shadows. Because, you know, the Russian mob can’t make itself too known. Until Jennifer’s son, Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage, who we’re supposed to give credence to as a Russian mob boss), can take it no more, and sends his goons into the care home to bust Jennifer out. In one of many scenes to be filed under: would never happen (at least not without so little police fanfare afterward), Roman’s primary henchman, Alexi Ignatyev (Nicholas Logan), shoots up the place and leaves with Jennifer in tow before Marla and Fran appear outside to beat the shit out of him just as he thinks he’s going to get away with her.
Blakeson’s writing and directing debut in 2009, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, offers an aligning theme of kidnapping and choosing the wrong victim to fuck with as well. But with I Care A Lot, like another Brit who somewhat missed the mark with his appraisal of America, Martin McDonagh (famed for the overblown movie that is Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Blakeson seems to have glommed onto a kernel of what can happen in the world of guardianship abuse with the elderly and run away with it for the sake of the “dark” tinge of the narrative. Except if it were truly dark, Blakeson wouldn’t have seen fit to allow for some sort of karmic comeuppance against Marla. Yet Blakeson does his best to spotlight the feminist angle of the story, with Marla clearly able to get away with so much precisely because she is an underestimated woman. And a woman surely can’t be capable of something so nefarious, not if we’re going by the tropes she’s expected to adhere to. She also surely can’t be capable of being something so important as a doctor, as made clear when Roman’s lawyer, Dean (Sam Messina), repeatedly uses “he” to describe Karen during his standoff scene with Marla.
Knowing to use underestimation to her benefit, Marla’s callous nature and its origins are only briefly alluded to when Roman threatens to kill her mother and she says she doesn’t care, to do whatever he wants to “that sociopath.” Apparently, sociopathy runs in the family. Or maybe it’s just that a woman finds out after enough time spent in a man’s world that you have to become numb in order to survive. Just as she is to the threats made against her by Roman and Dean. When Fran tries to tell her they should back out, she balks, saying she’s been threatened thousands of times and nothing ever happens because, “You can’t convince a woman to do what you want? Then you call her a bitch and threaten to kill her.”
About that word, “bitch,” I Care A Lot points out in several instances that it’s the only “epithet” needed to shut down a woman’s accomplishments and reduce her to nothing. A way to make her question her behavior and what she did to become a success. Like “slut,” there is no male equivalent of a moniker wielded so easily by men as a means to “put women in their place.” And even if Marla is seemingly unbothered when one of her clients’ sons keeps calling her that, we as the audience are aware that we’re thinking the same exact thing. Yet if she was a man, would we merely write the character off as an amoral “go-getter”?
As the film becomes more incongruous by the second act (particularly when Roman’s employees miraculously botch two murder attempts), Blakeson builds up to a happy ending (for Marla anyway) that is completely in line with the American dream our “heroine” was alluding to at the outset. We come to find her initial voiceover is from an interview she’s giving after opening a juggernaut of a corporation called Grayson Guardianships. When the interviewer asks her the secret to her success, she insists, “There is no secret. All it takes is hard work, and the courage and determination to never give up,” perpetuating the lie of rich people she had called out earlier. The richies, once they enter the club, have to stick together, after all. Because if they break the code, the proletariat goes apeshit when they see what’s behind the curtain. One supposes that’s the main aspect of I Care A Lot that doesn’t leave room to poke any holes in.
