"I Care A Lot" Depicts The Duplicity "Framing Britney Spears" Hints At
In the new dark-comedy thriller, Rosamund Pike plays a wolf that preys on seniors, and unintentionally adds to the #FreeBritney movement.
Ben Affleck may have been the star of David Fincher’s 2014 film Gone Girl, but it was Rosamund Pike that stole the show. Her portrayal of the missing-wife-turned-mastermind-antiheroine instantly made Amy Dunne one of the best villains in film history (notice I didn’t say “female villains”), while also earning praise as being progressively feminist. (Much of that credit also goes to Gillian Flynn, who accomplished the rare feat of not only adapting her own novel into a screenplay, but making it equally as good.)
Pike steps into similar shoes again in the sarcastically-titled new film, I Care A Lot, written and directed by J Blakeson and released on February 19th. Pike plays Marla Grayson, a woman that has crafted and perfected a scheme that exploits the laws of legal guardianship. When seniors with few familial ties end up in deteriorating health, they can placed under the legal guardianship of the state and a professional caretaker. Marla makes herself that caretaker for those seniors, particularly those with a lifetime of savings, and then milks them for money under the guise of care.
Marla is good at what she does, and she knows it. She’s seductive to both men and women alike (Eiza Gonzalez plays her partner in crime, and life), and has the courage of her convictions and willpower of somebody who was once naïve and then rudely-awakened. (Her name is likely a homage to Marla Singer, of Fight Club.) Her scheme requires her to pretend to care about the lives of those in her care, but she makes no such attempts to care when it comes to anybody’s opinion of her. Her eyes are on the pot of the gold at the end of the rainbow. Red is her colour of choice, but it’s green that drives her.
In that, Pike’s Marla Grayson mirrors Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street. Both antiheroes see the world as a set of rules that benefit those who take what they want. These takers are prey to no predators. They’re nobody’s sheep. Marla calls herself a “fucking lionness.” In The Wolf of Wall Street, Belfort tells us “There’s no nobility in poverty. I have been a rich man and I have been a poor man. And I choose rich every fuckin’ time.” I Care A Lot begins in a similar way, with Marla saying in the opening narration: “I’ve been poor. It doesn’t agree with me.”
I Care A Lot falls short of The Wolf of Wall Street, however. (That’s no disappointment, Martin Scorsese’s film is a high bar.) In Scorsese’s film, Jordan Belfort is depicted as a product of the culture of Wall Street. The film sticks with Belfort, but Wall Street and greed are the subtext throughout. Greed is also at the core of I Care A Lot, but the film doesn’t spotlight the exploitation of legal guardianship laws — a real-world problem — beyond laying out the parameters of Marla’s scheme. (For a further examination, I was going to suggest episode 5 of season 2 of Netflix’s documentary series Dirty Money, but that episode appears to have been removed due to a lawsuit filed against Netflix, so instead read the New Yorker’s article on the subject.)
The serendipitous timing of I Care A Lot’s release also adds a layer that has coloured the film differently. Released two weeks after the New York Times’ documentary about the legal conservatorship of pop icon Britney Spears, Framing Britney Spears, I Care A Lot depicts what many suspect Britney Spears continues to be a victim of as a result of her being placed under the conservatorship of her father in 2008, a legal arrangement identical to that of guardianship over seniors. I Care A Lot ends up focusing more on Marla’s greed than her exploitation of legal guardianship, but it’s nonetheless hard to watch both films and not connect the dots.
Regardless, I Care A Lot remains a brisk movie. Peter Dinklage is unintentionally funny as the crime boss that Marla crosses when her latest target ends up being his mother, but primarily because his look is akin to that of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Chris Messina’s mob lawyer brings to mind his role as Victor Zsasz in last year’s Birds of Prey. Again, though, it’s Rosamund Pike’s performance that’s once again the draw. She made her film debut as an icy Bond girl (aptly named Miranda Frost) in 2002’s Die Another Day, and it’s that Ice Queen persona that made Amy Dunne so indelible. Marla Grayson is the same beast, albeit a different animal, and that animal, in her own words, is a fucking lioness.
About the Creator
Howard Chai
Thinker. Writer. Lover. Fighter.
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