Review: I Care a Lot (2020)

I’m starting to worry that contemporary filmmakers don’t know how to write female villains. That’s my main takeaway from J Blakeson’s I Care a Lot. The film follows a duplicitous, sociopathic female character, Rosamund Pike’s professional guardian, Marla Grayson, but doesn’t have the courage to make you hate the obviously evil woman at its centre. It’s the latest in a recent spat of pop culture projects that seems to imply that female characters cannot be consciously evil. These films include the Disney revisionist takes on female villains like Maleficent and Cruella de Ville, which transform their monstrous villains into sympathetic antiheroes, as well as popular TV shows like Netflix’s Ratched and even the wildly popular novel and musical, Wicked. The more popular entertainment we get like these aforementioned projects, the more I feel that what is often touted as feminist entertainment is actually condescending and muddled storytelling.

It’s a disappointing turn, as I Care a Lot has a killer hook in its story of a woman entrapping vulnerable and wealthy seniors and stripmining their estates for all their worth. The concept plays into the fact—now too-obvious in our COVID world—that western society mistreats senior citizens and is too prone to incentivize and privatize social care as a solution to that mistreatment, leaving itself vulnerable to predators that would manipulate the system. It also makes a clever comment on how a female sociopath is best able to navigate gendered professional classes and manipulate the “feminine” industry of senior care. It even has the good fortune to star Rosamund Pike, who played perhaps the best female villain of the past decade in David Fincher’s Gone Girl. Pike has a good time in the role, leveraging her icy beauty and verbal dexterity to craft a vision of “girlboss-as-predator.” But J Blakeson, who writes and directs, isn’t comfortable in really letting you hate Pike’s Marla.

It’s a strange reticence, as the opening moments of the film introduce Marla as this unabashedly predatory individual. In voiceover, we hear her break down the world into predators and prey and proudly declare that she’s the former, willing to cut every corner, skirt every moral reservation, and do absolutely anything to make money and favour herself. Manipulating a sympathetic judge and society’s disinterest in old people is an efficient means to her ends. Marla isn’t asking for sympathy and in the early moments of the film, Blakeson isn’t interested in giving it to her. He’s comfortable simply depicting her awesome efficiency and allowing us to be disgusted with her while equally wondering if we could ever be smart and ruthless enough to get away with something similar. It’s an approach borrowed from satires like American Psycho, where you’re lured into being impressed with Patrick Bateman’s vanity at the same time you’re sickened by it.

But somewhere along the way, the film pivots and starts to present Marla as the dogged, and perhaps even justified, antihero who deserves our sympathy over her antagonists in the film. After putting a wealthy elderly woman (Dianne Wiest) in a nursing home against her will, Marla finds herself up against the woman’s gangster son (Peter Dinklage), whom she didn’t know she had. The son is adamant on freeing his mother from the home and taking revenge on Marla, forcing a confrontation between two evil figures. 

Casting Dinklage is another case of Blakeson having strong actors at his disposal, but he might’ve been mistaken in trying to frame Dinklage’s gangster as a more malevolent force than Marla. Sure, the character is rich and powerful and eager to inflict as much pain on her as possible. But Dinklage is an actor known for playing prickly outcasts with a lovable, and sympathetic, side—he’s Tyrion Lannister, for chrissakes!, the most lovable drunkard genius in modern TV history.

So when midway through the film, after we’ve watched Dinklage’s gangster try and fail to intimidate Marla and secure the release of his mother—which is frankly admirable in the context of the film—I Care a Lot starts to shift to a tale of survival. And when a figure is fighting for survival, in this particular case, a woman, we’re inclined to be inherently sympathetic.

How sympathizing with a sociopath forwards the film’s ostensible goal of satirizing the ruthless nature of American society is beyond me. But it’s nevertheless the tactic the film takes two-thirds of the way through the runtime, which guts the social commentary. After stacking the deck against Marla, it shifts to trying to humanize her through her relationship with her girlfriend, Fran (Eiza González), and to play on our instinctual protective reaction against depictions of women in danger on screen. We watch her narrowly avoid death only to return to the loving arms of Fran and plot revenge on the stupid men who failed to kill her, and I wondered whether I was watching a completely different film than the one I started.

Frankly, the entire manipulative approach is distasteful. For one, it tries to weaponize the viewer’s sympathy for same sex couples on screen (still a rarity for movies not explicitly about the gay experience), reducing Fran to a mere accessory for Marla. It also seems to indicate that although Marla is a sociopath—i.e. a person defined by their antisocial behaviour and inability to care about others—she’s still capable of being a good and loving partner, which makes us question the whole sociopathic approach. And then there are the narrative convolutions that start to pile-up to manufacture an ending where Marla is able to turn the tables on the gangsters and show that she truly is the predator among predators. I’m not usually one to gripe about narrative implausibilities on screen, but after watching a gangster concoct elaborate plans to kill people that inevitably go awry when a bullet to the head and a chain tied to a cinder block would’ve done the job, I start to lose patience.

It’s not that I Care a Lot is haphazardly written though, or shot like a bad straight-to-streaming film with all close-ups and indistinct backgrounds. There’s a good idea here and some competent filmmaking behind it. Sure, its formal approach largely mimics the work of David Fincher. The cinematography emphasizes the elegant, yet cold, architectural world that Marla inhabits, and the music from Marc Canham is trying really hard to be Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score for The Social Network. Trying to ape a great filmmaker is rarely a bad approach to this kind of cynical entertainment.

No, what sinks I Care a Lot is simply its lack of conviction. It pivots away from satirizing the ways that American culture is able to monetize and pervert even the most commendable of social care and towards showcasing a kind of girl-power revenge tale. Then it even lacks the conviction of going all-in on the reformative approach to Marla. The ending features a comeuppance that would be right at home in the era of the Hays Code. Perhaps the ending is intended as another comment on how American society cannot let a woman get away with what a man can—that sexist double-standards are true even for sociopaths. But it’s halfway between commentary and tragedy, left adrift between a satisfying execution of either. Thus, it’s unable to provide us satisfaction at Marla’s defeat, since it hedged against our antipathy, but neither can it truly subvert the genre’s expectations by so readily playing into them.

It all comes down to the fact that Marla is the object of both satire and tragedy. In a film that wants us to believe there are only predators or prey in the world, it concludes that its protagonist is a lethal blend of the two, muddling the entire thesis of the work and leaving us wondering what the hell the film was really satirizing in the first place.

4 out of 10

I Care a Lot (2020, USA)

Written and directed by J Blakeson; starring Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage, Eiza González, Dianne Wiest, Chris Messina, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Macon Blair, Alicia Witt, Damian Young, Nicholas Logan.

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