I Care a Lot

[peter]

It's interesting to see when a director misjudges the audience by a sliver of a degree and as a result the product comes out wrong.

This is absolutely the case in the J Blakeson directed I Care a Lot, currently screening on Amazon Prime. In this black comedy Rosamund Pike stars as Massachusetts care professional Marla Grayson, who uses her slick delivery and professional connections with the medical community to select appropriate individuals of a given age and then use an unsuspecting state apparatus to have them commited to care under her guardianship. Once under this less than gentle 'protection', she commences to sell their assets and trouser the profit, to the advantage of not only herself, but the doctors and care home owners with whom she is in cahoots. This is done often despite the inefectual protestations of the individuals family members (who Marla paints in court as being delinquent in their responsibilities to their aged parent) and the complete capabilities of the 'mark' to look after themselves notwithstanding. In the case in which the events of the film surround the chosen mark is presented by the doctor as a "cherry' - an elderly individual on her (the doctor's) books who is both very wealthy and completely unencumbered with annoying family members who tend to dislike having their perfectly competent relatives spirited away from under their feet and all of their assets taken. Problem is that in this particular case the doctor gets it just a tad wrong - in that the reason she is unaware of the woman's family is that she is the mother of a Russian Mafia billionaire........who suddenly finding his beloved mother under a restraining care order is understandably pissed. Cue the action that follows in which Marla and her lesbian lover must try to extricate themselves from the mess they have gotten themselves into.

Now so far so good - the premise is interesting (even if uncomfortably close to things that one suspect might actually be occurring in our invasive and authoritarian state mechanisms for dealing with the problem of elderly care) but the execution flawed. The problem is that the director misjudges the point at which he can push his protagonist into the sphere of being 'bad', but still keep the audience onside. Marla is simply too unscrupulous, more a psychopath than a street smart con-artist, for the viewer to relate to. So when she starts going up against her nemesis and the going gets tough you find yourself hoping that he will get to put the blowtorch to her feet - and this isn't the way that the film is meant to be. We're meant to root for Marla, the pretty lady up against impossible odds but instead we just feel cold toward her. The film keeps you watching - it is not a bad film by any standards - it just fails to get you empathising even to the smallest degree with the lead character, a trick essential in every way for a film to be truly successful.

So yes - nine out of ten for effort, two out of ten for execution. That's my assessment.

[wayfriend]

As I happened to see this just the other day, I will add some pennies.

My wife and I both found it impossible to identify with the protagonist. Despite all her rationalizations, what she was doing was just so unconscionably wrong that we longed for her demise 15 minutes in. Rooting for the Peter Dinklage character seemed like a good idea, but that didn't last long. In the end, we didn't care about anyone.

Diane Wiest (the mom) got all the best moments in the movie. A little humor. But you could not even care about her by the end.

If this movie is trying to say something, I don't know what it is. It is just deplorable people being deplorable.

[peter]

Agreed - any message in the film apart from 'don't be a shit - no-one will like you', is so deeply buried as to be undiscoverable. I wondered if there might be a feminist revenge thing going on, but again if so, it so badly backfired as to be ridiculous.

Yup - definitely one to chalk up to the also ran's

(I've seen a couple of episodes of Fortitude by the way {first series}. Getting interesting!)

[lucimay]

i haven't watched it and probably wont because Rosamund Pike.

SHE is not likable. i say this because i've seen her on interviews and chat shows and...i could not find ONE thing to like about her...well except she is very pretty. i havent seen her in all that many movies (Gone Girl, Jack Reacher, maybe one or two others) but i havent much cared for her in anything in which she was supposed to be in any way sympathetic. she was GREAT in Gone Girl but oh...she played a woman that was not likable! lol!!

anyways...i figured if she was in it i wouldn't like it so i decided against watching it.

just my 2 cents. not carved in granite.

[[Syl]]

At the very end, I ended up not hating it as much as I thought I would before that. Other than that, just the same things everyone else has said. And as I think I said in a similar Facebook post, my biggest problem was that the set-up seemed to be for Wiest to be the agent of Pike's undoing, but that fell mostly flat (to the point where she had almost no agency whatsoever) and came a hair's breadth from being one big shaggy dog story.

[Cagliostro]

I hated this movie. I was certainly engrossed, but just ended up hating it because of several things, namely the final minutes of the film that was just there for revenge freaks, and several points throughout the movie where the believability went out of the window for me. I really felt like taking a shower after, especially because Rosamund Pike's character was such a demon.

[Cagliostro]

Oh, and just want to say I saw a similar feeling movie called Promising Young Woman last night, but liked it tons more. It was a very tricky film with a main character that you have trouble with right from the start.