She Doesn’t Give a Rat’s Ass

I Care a Lot a film by J Blakeson.  With Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage, Eliza Gonzalez, Diane Wiest.  Streaming on Netflix.  *****

I Care a Lot—a comedy—is the most morally despicable movie I’ve seen in years.  The female protagonists are the most hateful characters I can recall in a film.  It includes stomach-churning violence, has any number of unlikely or impossible incidents, and enough plot turns to make the viewer dizzy.  I was furious at what happened on the screen most of the time.  I was also riveted to every scene.  I saw the end approaching with a feeling of despair.  And then, at the last minute, it had one of the most satisfying endings I’ve ever seen in a movie.

I loved it.  Though for most of the movie I hated it.

Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike) is a woman who has created an elaborate scam.  Along with a woman named Dr. Amos (Alicia Witt), she has perfectly competent old people declared incompetent and helpless, is appointed as their guardian—supposedly because she “cares a lot”—then prevents their loved ones from seeing them and drains their finances, all for her personal gain.  As a person one year older than her primary target, I found the early part of the movie terrifying.  I know from having seen it happen that no sooner do you get old people into an institution than pretty soon they do get feeble and their minds start to go.  If you’re not demented when you go in, you soon will be.

Early on we see Marla preventing a middle-aged son from even communicating with his mother, as a result of a court order.  She’s an expert at working the system and blinding the courts to the truth.  Her accomplice in these scams is her lesbian lover, a woman named Fran (Eliza Gonzalez).  I can’t remember a trio of more villainous women than Dr. Amos, Marla Grayson, and Fran.

But after the early episodes she picks on a woman she shouldn’t, a perfectly competent oldster named Jennifer Peterson (Diane Wiest).  Jennifer seems to have no living relatives, and when Marla arrives at her house acting authoritative, and telling her she has no choice, she accompanies Jennifer to the assisted living facility, after which she is totally out of touch.  Actually, the name Jennifer Peterson is assumed; she is the beloved mother of a member of the Russian mafia (?) named Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage), who happens to be a dwarf.  He’s no less menacing for all that.  He’s actually more menacing.  He has a lawyer named Dean Ericson (Chris Messina), who is smooth at making threats.  We’re delighted by his arrival.  These women are about to get their comeuppance.

Yet they don’t.  Dean Ericson is a wily lawyer, Roman Lunyov a cold-blooded killer, surrounded by other killers, but these women, especially Marla, are a match for them.  For every move they make, she’s got a counter move.  They bribe her with $300,000 and she wants ten million.  They threaten her with death and she’s ready to die.  To some extent, among other things, this is a gender war, and the women are winning, a popular situation if the women weren’t so despicable.

There are all kinds of reasons that this kind of thing couldn’t happen.  The judge who keeps committing people to Marla’s care is a moron who swallows her explanations hook, line and sinker.  Not only is Marla in collusion with the director of the assisted living facility, but the whole staff is in on the scam, running the place like a concentration camp.  If these guys were really Mafiosos they would have put a bullet through Marla’s head, instead of trying to make her death look like an accident (ditto for Fran’s demise).  And in the scenes that actually do happen, the women’s survival is still impossible.  This movie makes Fatal Attraction look like bold realism.

Yet there’s just enough truth here to make us uneasy.  Women have achieved at least cinematic equality with men; they’re just as ruthless and greedy and determined to become rich.  Assisted living facilities aren’t in on some elaborate scam, but they are willing to give their clients drugs and leave them sitting around watching television so they won’t be much trouble.  The culture as a whole seems perfectly willing to write off and ignore old people (except when they’re senators or presidential candidates).  And we do glorify and praise people—like Marla—who succeed wildly at their business, even when it is morally suspect.

There’s something about the Netflix experience that makes me unusually sensitive to the movie’s length; I couldn’t believe how close we were getting to the end with the situation not fully resolved.  Was the filmmaker actually rooting for these women, would these ruthless and immoral women overcome the Russian mafia?  That’s why the ending, as unlikely and melodramatic as many other moments in the movie, was so satisfying.  I hated almost every scene except the last one.

But I was riveted to the screen.  And all these actors, but especially Rosamund Pike, were superb.  She has created one of the great female villains of all time.  I loved her acting.  Hated the character.

If this movie had come out when people were going to theaters, it would have been wildly popular.  And J Blakeson is a brilliant writer and director.