Blakeson likes to underline Marla’s audacity, her determination to win at any cost, only to turn around and emphasize her vulnerability, forcing her into deadly situations that are invariably of her own making. That fraught initial confrontation sets a pattern for the rest of the movie.
It helps that Feldstrom is presented as a ranting, emasculated loser with a violent streak, all the better for Marla to position herself, none too persuasively, as some kind of feminist avenger - and also to keep you from thinking too hard about the human consequences of her ruse. When a plaintiff, Feldstrom (Macon Blair), rails against Marla for denying him access to his mother, her well-practiced, level-headed response - that she takes better care of her charges than their own children do, because she actually gets paid to do it - is meant to elicit your outrage, yes, but also your laughter and, eventually, your grudging admiration. The movie, perhaps realizing the difficulty of the assignment, preemptively stacks the deck in Marla’s favor.
None of which makes Marla an easy character to root for, which would be less of a problem if “I Care a Lot” didn’t so clearly want you to root for her.īeing lured into a sense of complicity with unapologetically evil people is one of the reliable pleasures of the movies, but wanting the robbers to pull off a heist is a far cry from, you know, cheering on elder abuse. She effectively takes them captive, divesting them of their assets and turning a tidy profit for all involved.
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With the help of Fran (Eiza González), her partner in crime and romance, plus key accomplices at hospitals and assisted-living facilities, Marla targets wealthy older individuals who are too sick and helpless - or who, with a little creative paperwork, can be made to look too sick and helpless - to handle their personal affairs. In this movie’s vision of present-day America as a late-capitalist shark tank, Marla is an unusually sleek and lethal barracuda.
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Sit back, the movie insists, and enjoy the guilt-free spectacle of horrible people doing horrible things to arguably even more horrible people, then having still more horrible things done to them in return, and so on and so on until the hand of fate or God or the writer-director J Blakeson swoops in to settle scores and divvy up the spoils.Īnd for a while at least, Blakeson makes enjoyment easy enough, aided by a lead actor with an undeniable knack for slick, conspiratorial villainy. Even when she scoffs in our direction (“You think you’re good people? You’re not good people”), the insult isn’t meant to shame us so much as liberate us. She runs a lucrative scam as a court-appointed (but really self-imposed) guardian for elderly wards of the state, and as such she has a smooth bedside manner and a gift for coaxing others into submission, the viewer included.
Those are the words of Marla Grayson (Pike), a taker and proud of it. Even Pike’s breathily cynical narration seems to channel her “Gone Girl” monologues, though the tough Hobbesian worldview she advances here could have used a sharper rewrite: “There’s two types of people in this world,” she notes early on, “the people who take and those getting took.” Not too long into “I Care a Lot,” a comic thriller with a delectably hard shell and a soft, hollow center, you might wonder if someone managed to slip in an outtake or two from “Gone Girl.” Like that earlier tale of crime and punishment, though with less gore and more glib, the movie stars Rosamund Pike as a woman whose impeccable poise and radiant smile could fool you into overlooking some of her other attributes: ruthless persistence, killer negotiation skills and a quiet mastery of the long con.
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