Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I Care a Lot’ on Netflix, a Deliciously Nasty Satire Brought to Vivid Life by Rosamund Pike

Netflix movie I Care a Lot scared up a Golden Globe nom for star Rosamund Pike, who shifts back into Gone Girl mode while playing a steely professional guardian who exploits senior citizens to satisfy her lust for — well, can you guess what she lusts after? No, not kitten nuzzles, rare Skittle flavors or Funko Pops, but the usual stuff: power, and money. It’s a premise ripped from real-life headlines, which, on top of Pike’s deliciously nasty performance, amplifies its gotta-see quotient. Now let’s see if the movie lives up to the buzz.

I CARE A LOT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Marla Grayson (Pike) has a haircut that looks like it could trim six inches off the top of your hedge with a nod and a shake. It’s telling. She owns Grayson Guardianship, a firm that places seniors in homes and assumes control of their assets when they’re deemed medically incapable of taking care of themselves. On the surface, she seems reputable, especially to the judge (Isiah Whitlock Jr., keeping his sheeeeeeee-its leashed) overseeing her cases. She works the guy like putty. But we know better, because in voiceover narration just oozing with vile tones of greed and entitlement, she says she’s “a lioness.”

Case in point, poor Feldstrom (Macon Blair), who tries to single-handedly storm a care facility because Marla’s barred him from seeing his own mother. His desperation — and arrest — only makes his case worse to the judge, who buys Marla’s line that she’s liquidating the old woman’s assets to pay the retirement home fees. That’s half-true, or maybe one-third-true, possibly only one-fifth-true, because she and her little company are pretty much raiding her clients’ life savings. The scam is working nicely: Marla wallpapers her office with her clients’ mugshots. Whether these poor people are actually incapacitated is a moot point. They no longer have control. She does.

Marla and her business/life partner Fran (Eiza Gonzalez) plop down with Dr. Amos (Alicia Witt), who offers them “a cherry.” Oh hey, by the way, the medical pros are in on the scam too. The doc pushes our swindle-happy non-heroines toward Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), a retired finance-industry type with a chubby nest egg, no family to get in the way and the type of memory loss that’s probably normal for folks her age but that an unscrupulous physician could trump up as debilitating dementia. Deal. She’s the new mark. I think Marla and Fran are turned on by predatory elder abuse, because for a second there I thought they were going to pull over on the way home and jump each other’s bones on the side of the road. Marla leaps over the judge and deposits Jennifer in the retirement facility whose director is part of this scam too, of course, which allows Marla to dictate her medication levels and time in the rumpus room, etc. Then she and Fran get to work ransacking the woman’s lovely home. She’ll never see it again.

Marla finds the key to Jennifer’s safe deposit box, which has a book in it and in the book is a secret cutout spot and in the secret cutout spot is a paper bag and in the paper bag is a cloth sack and in the cloth sack is a handful of diamonds. Her eyes widen like a monkey who just happened across a banana plantation. Meanwhile, Fran’s prepping the house for sale when a cab driver pulls up and asks for Jennifer, then reports to his boss that she ain’t there and who knows why. He’s not really a cab driver, and the boss, Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage), isn’t happy. He pauses a report from one of his employees about the status of their drug mules from Mexico to deal with the Jennifer situation, because Jennifer is his mother. That’s something Marla didn’t know about, and there’s a reason for that. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Roman seems to have even fewer scruples than Marla. I think her mettle is about to be tested — or vice-versa, motherf—a! HAHAHAHAHA.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is sort of like a David Fincher version of The Big Short, but for one of the many, many (many) other corrupt American institutions that victimize the innocent and reward slimy, manipulative shitbirds. Marla’s definitely an antihero bringing to mind some of the movies’ greediest, ickiest antiheroes, like Daniel Plainview, Don Corleone or the slimewad protagonist from a Fincher classic — Mark Zuckerberg.

Performance Worth Watching: Pike just edges Dinklage in this sociopathy-off. Both relish the opportunity to be thoroughly hateable — he throws smoothies, ties his hair into a topknot, works the steady rings; she hits the vape pen, dons red spike heels, sweats it out in spin class — but she just has more screen time. As for Wiest, she steals a scene with spicy relish; see “memorable dialogue” below.

Memorable Dialogue: Jennifer clears the cobwebs of her prescription-drug stupor just enough to issue a warning to Marla: “Have at it, you little crock of (omg, Weist uses the C-WORD here!). Have at it.”

Sex and Skin: A brief shot of Pike in wet undies.

Our Take: I Care a Lot starts out outrageous, in the literal sense that it fuels our outrage, not for yet another movie that forces our alignment with a disempathetic scoundrel’s point-of-view, but for Marla’s victims, whose lives are stolen from them, and the system that enables the success of such schemes. Marla is cruel, vicious, grotesque and utterly believable to those of us who struggle to be idealistic Americans in the face of the shameless hypocrisy and unapologetic gluttony of so many late-capitalism profiteers. The movie could be about the healthcare system, or insurance companies, or internet service providers, or social media platforms, or nonprofit charities, or corporate retailers, or utilities, or the government, but not banks, because their shenanigans have already been covered in viciously satirical movies like this one.

So it’s distasteful at first, because we imagine being in the place of Marla’s victims, who’ve been cuckoo’s-nested right out of their lives, all their belongings and money and liberty taken away. We really want an earnest Mark Ruffalo type to enter the narrative and whistleblow her into prison, but no, instead we get Chris Messina playing Roman’s lawyer, a gooey mollusk in a purple tie — more of a light purple, not quite periwinkle — who says in so many words that she’s messing with the wrong people and might just end up kaputskies if she doesn’t take this briefcase containing a tidy payoff to release Jennifer from her shackles. This is when she doubles down against Roman, and the goddamn movie forces us to decide whether we want to side with the malefactor within the all-too-easily corruptible system of American law or the one working outside of it. And if I’m not mistaken, writer/director J Blakeson asserts that those within are further across the moral rubicon than those without.

But there’s a point in the film when a third option reveals itself: Sit back and watch the sharks try to eat each other, and appreciate the mordant hyperbole the film wields so gleefully. As Marla and Roman match wits, the film becomes less a satire of amalgamated American fraud, more a twist-addled thriller of one-upmanship that brought to mind, of all things, Step Brothers and the sillier moments in James Bond films. Blakeson nicely defies an expectation or two down the stretch, and draws everything together to a reasonably sharp thematic point. Even if the dark comedy only works in fits and starts, and it’s hard to find any emotional traction in its critical intent, the film has style, strong ideas, colorful performances and lively dialogue, and therefore plenty to keep us entertained — and more than a little bit righteously angry at the injustices of our world.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Come for the Pike-Dinklage battle royale, stay for the bitter satirical commentary.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream I Care a Lot on Netflix