1. Let me just be blunt right off the top: Y’all this movie is not good. Do not waste two hours of your life on it unless you are just absolutely obsessed with Rosamund Pike, who actually does put in a good performance.
2. But if you want to see Rosamund Pike put in a good performance like this, just watch Gone Girl instead because it’s the exact same Ruthless White Woman with a Severe Bob.
3. I’m biased against I Care A Lot upfront because it’s about guardianship, which is a weird side-interest I have. Anytime some news organization does a piece on it, I read it. If there’s a Dateline segment, I’ll watch it. If you send me a podcast, I’ll listen to it. I don’t really think there’s space to do a dark comedy about a subject that is A) So serious and B) So underreported on. I think sometimes there are serious topics that hit a point in national discourse where you can find humor, typically from the POV of the people challenging the power dynamic. I’ve seen comedy in movies about prostitutes, comedy in movies about the Black community’s relationship to the police — but these are topics we have actual conversations about. The conversations about guardianship over elders are so few and far between. We’re not talking about it enough, and older people are having their autonomy stripped away in the blink of an eye because of greed and neglect. We don’t care about older people in nursing homes the way we care about Black people and prostitutes.
4. So the topic is tricky already, and the entire focus of the movie is on the woman who is exploiting the victims. Do you want to watch a comedy about Black people and the police from the POV of the cops? Do you want to watch a comedy about the lives of prostitutes from the POV of abusive Johns? That’s what this movie is doing. It’s a movie about a subject where very real victims are struggling to fight their way out of the situation, but it’s from the POV of the abusers. I don’t want it! If I had known this was what the movie was about, I wouldn’t have bothered watching it.
5. Rosamund Pike plays her role (Marla Grayson) very well because that is a role she knows how to play very well. But I hate her. I didn’t hate Amy Dunne in Gone Girl because there was space to empathize with her motivations and there was space to hate her counterpart in Ben Affleck. I Care A Lot wants to build that same dynamic between Rosamund and Peter Dinklage’s character and make you hate both of them, which is exactly what happens, but that’s not the relationship that needed the dynamic shift. To have any investment in Marla, we don’t need to hate Peter — we need to hate the old lady she stuffed in an old age home, and we don’t. We are rooting for her, not either of the two leads. You cannot get me to care about two people trying to kill each other when one is a Russian mobster and one abuses old people. At one point Marla tells the staff to basically starve the old lady and screw with her medication — how am I ever supposed to care about that character?
6. The whole film feels like they gave a bunch of money to an amateur filmmaker in Brooklyn and said “hey, make a dark comedy thriller with panache.” The fight scene in the nursing home is so ridiculous and out of place I feel owed an apology.
7. So many things stretch belief. A Russian mobster can’t effectively kill anybody? The stairwell to the parking garage is conveniently by the front desk on the way to the bathroom? You get drugged and conveniently wake up just before you hit the water? Yes these are spoilers, and no I didn’t warn you because you don’t need to watch this movie.
8. The filmmaker himself doesn’t even know what kind of movie he made. He said the ending was a little unsatisfying because the only likeable character is crying at the end. He thinks the only likable character in the movie is one of the partners in the Abuse Old People Scam, and not the old lady who was being abused and fighting tooth and nail to escape. That kind of disconnect from the material is why this movie is trash.
9. I liked it less and less the more I sat and tried to figure out what exactly he was trying to do, so I guess on the surface it’s mildly enjoyable — I gave it a 5 after I first saw it. I’m taking away points for being more and more annoyed as the days pass.
10. Diane Weist was outstanding and I needed twice as much screentime from her.
Score: 3/10
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