Golden Globes 2021: I Care A Lot
I don’t usually watch anything that can be described as a thriller. To this day, I haven’t seen Get Out or Midsommar or Hereditary or anything like that. I know some of those are better examples of horror than thriller, but the point I’m trying to make here is that I scare easily. I’ll jump out of my skin if I’m tapped on the shoulder the wrong way. This definitely affects the kind of content I consume, especially since I currently live alone.
Because of this, I was initially wary to watch I Care a Lot, categorized as a dark comedy thriller, but after watching I think that label is appropriate. There is some violence, though nothing too gory, and there aren’t any jump scares or anything like that.
In the film, Rosamund Pike stars as Marla Grayson, a con woman who makes her living as a court appointed legal guardian who, in cahoots with local doctors and nursing homes, takes advantage of vulnerable seniors and steals their wealth. All is going well for Marla when she takes on Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest) as her charge, unbeknownst to her messing with the wrong woman with very powerful friends. What follows is a film filled with the Russian mafia shenanigans, shoot outs, and a lot of failed murder attempts, like any good action-packed thriller.
I have mixed feelings about this film! I did have a good time watching it (I guess I do like an explosion and a car chase every once in a while, what can I say) and I thought a lot of the cast did a really great job, including Golden Globe nominated Rosamund Pike, Dianne Wiest, and Peter Dinklage as Wiest’s son and a take-no-prisoners mob boss.
However, I think that the film lacked strong emotional and character development, which erased any sense of moral ambiguity about who I as an audience member should be rooting for. I know anti-heroes have been the protagonist of the moment for the past 20 years and the label has been dominated for years by male characters, but Marla Grayson isn’t an anti-hero- she’s just a villain. What she does is bad. She does not have redeeming characteristics. Even her relationship with Fran (Eiza Gonzalez), her business and life partner, is under-explored, and aside from the fact that they’re both (a) gorgeous and (b) interested in getting rich, I didn’t know why they were together. While I understand that it is a convention of the genre to have a male protagonist’s love interest by under utilized and usually serve as some variety of the fridged woman trope, and I did appreciate the fact that the main character was in a lesbian relationship that went largely uncommented on, I still needed more from it to understand the stakes. Additionally, Grayson has little to no backstory, all we know is she used to have nothing, and now she is well on her way to having everything she’s ever wanted. I needed more.
A contributing factor to my struggle to understand or empathize with her is that Roman Lunyov, Peter Dinklage’s character, had a more developed background and motivation. Grayson took his mother, he wants to get her back. Simple, clear, and effective. Call me a bleeding heart, but I’m always gonna root for the guy that uses unsavory methods to get his mom back than for the lady who uses unsavory methods to get rich.
Now you may be thinking, “Stephanie, this is how action movies are. You get a cardboard cutout, love-to-hate-him, sexy male protagonist who cons people all the time! It’s our turn now!” I get that, but in this particular case, it doesn’t work for me. The film is clearly framed as being Grayson’s narrative and we are following her arc, but they make it impossible to root for her. This isn’t because she’s unlikeable or unfeminine or any other cliched critiques on powerful women, she’s actually both feminine and likable. It’s because she’s not comprehendible. Aside from an unwavering determination to get rich, which Pike commits to whole-heartedly, I felt like I didn’t know anything about her. Walter White and the Ozarks guy and all the other million and a half male anti-heroes have back stories that explain their whole shtick, that’s why they’re ANTI-heroes.
Anyway, if you enjoy the thriller genre or heist movies or con artists, you might want to give the movie a shot and see what you think, especially if you’re familiar with the genre than I am. Maybe there’s a lot that I’m missing, I claim no authority on the topic.