I Care a Lot is packaged in dark humor (Pike's Best Actress win was in the Musical or Comedy category) but the reality behind it uncovers a bleak, ugly truth. Three stars out of four.When Rosamund Pike accepted her Golden Globe for her performance in I Care a Lot, she quipped in her speech, "Maybe I just have to thank America's broken legal system for making it possible to make stories like this."Īnd by "stories like this" she means the new Netflix thriller directed by J Blakeson, which follows Marla Grayson, a legal-appointed guardian for the elderly who scams away their assets for her own profit. “I Care a Lot,” a Netflix release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for language throughout and some violence. She’s quite detestable and completely compelling. But it’s strong, gripping, unpredictable pulp, and Pike pulls something off that few else could as a protagonist.
It doesn’t all fit together, and “I Care a Lot” has ultimately no way of resolving its fairly ludicrous plot. Is this a lot for a film about a corrupt court-appointed guardian? Yes. “Do you know how many times I’ve been threatened by a man?” she says, utterly unimpressed. Who would dare turn down a fearsome, well-armed international mafioso who, in this case, also happens to be in the right? But Marla’s resistance, as a woman undeterred by male intimidation, accumulates in courage. Her resistance to the various entreaties from Roman’s team - foremost among them is a very good Chris Messina as a knowing attorney who nevertheless can’t match Marla in court - seems reckless and foolish at first. It also positions Marla as something more than a greedy vulture. Instead, Blakeson’s film is gleefully amoral, less concerned with judging its obviously heinous characters than crafting a satire of American capitalism as a system where human trafficking is a mode of doing business.
#I care a lot netflix movie#
There is, in one sense, no one to root for “I Care a Lot,” a movie where the most sympathetic figure drugs her imprisoned wards to keep them quiet.
#I care a lot netflix free#
Dinklage, as he often does, immediately recalibrates the movie, as Roman summons his forces - minions who cower before him while he snacks on an eclair or sips a smoothie - to free his mother. Jennifer turns out to be not just a meek old lady living alone but the mother of a powerful and well-financed underworld figure with ties to the Russian mafia, Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage).
But the twists and turns of “I Care a Lot” lead elsewhere - in more comic, off-balanced but generally deviously delightful directions. Having Dianne Wiest locked up is no less infuriating than Jack Nicholson being strapped into a mental hospital.
Marla and her partner-girlfriend (Eiza González), quickly start auctioning off her stuff.Īt this point, “I Care a Lot” seems poised to become another nightmare of wrongful institutionalization - a “Shock Corridor” for rest homes. A few falsified health records and a judge’s rubber stamp later, Jennifer is abruptly hauled off to a facility where her phone is taken and even straying outside is off limits. One of them hands Marla a “cherry” - an especially desirable new ward because she’s both wealthy and lacking any apparent living family that might interfere - in Jennifer (Dianne Wiest). Marla’s scheme is a particularly loathsome one, and the feeling of disgust only grows as writer-director Blakeson, the British filmmaker of the kidnap thriller “The Disappearance of Alice Creed,” depicts an interwoven system of elder abuse, with doctors and nursing home mangers all taking a cut. When so much real terror is stalking nursing homes, the timing of “I Care a Lot” (it debuts Friday on Netflix) is perhaps not ideal.