I Care A Lot (2021): Review (Minor Spoilers)

Rosamund Pike plays Marla Grayson, a self-professed and uncompromising shark who cons elderly people out of their livelihoods, in this outing from director J Blakeson, hereto perhaps best known for his work on BBC/HBO historical miniseries Gunpowder. The film presents a bleak vision of an insipid sort of capitalism in which a racket strikes through the heart of the care system, from the puppeteering overseers down to the conspiring care workers who carry out their dirty work. A wrench, however, is thrown in the works when Grayson unknowingly targets the mother of Roman Lunyov of the Russian mafia, played by Peter Dinklage. This provides a catalyst for the disintegration of the racket Grayson has established and she spends the film attempting to pull back together the pieces of her life’s work, while seeking both to revenge herself on Lunyov and maintain the illusion of power and control that she so desperately covets.

On one hand, then, is a unique and intriguing concept which underpins this film, and which served initially to draw me into watching it. I can’t help but feel, however, that the film failed to successfully reach the heights that the premise perhaps merited. Positive reviews of the film promised “an exhilarating pitch black comedy” and “a searing swipe at late-stage capitalism”, but neither of these concepts were realised in my opinion. Pitch black it may have been, but I can’t remember anything from this film that would have provoked a laugh, and the overwhelming impression, far from being that of exhilaration, was of hopelessness and dejection. As for the latter point, it’s a case of a swing-and-a-miss for me in the film’s attempts to critique late-stage capitalism. Marla Grayson is so unlikeable and repellent that it feels like a given that Blakeson is establishing her as a villain who is sure to get her comeuppance; and yet, she goes from win to win with the ease of a traditional superhero, and suffers very little for it. None of the ramifications of her hubris and of her evil doings are permanent (even the tooth she loses gets put straight back in), and it becomes pretty clear that the audience is supposed to be rooting for her against the more abstract and poorly-defined “big bad” of the likes of Lunyov. All of this contributes to a more potent feeling that this film is actually a celebration of late-stage capitalism - that exploiting the weak and powerless for financial gain is actually to be commended as long as the person doing it is a) a woman, b) gay?, and c) willing to put everything on the line to achieve power.

It almost goes without saying that Rosamund Pike is, in the face of the awful things about this film, exceptional here: her performance being one of the few highlights. Peter Dinklage has rightly been lauded, but for me he is let down by a lack of character development and backstory, some lacklustre direction (is he supposed to be Russian?), and even more terrible dialogue. The performances were not, unfortunately, enough to save this film.