I Care a Lot
Directed by J Blakeson
Running time: 1hr58 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Rosamund Pike stars in I Care a Lot
The first thing we see of Rosamund Pike's Marla Grayson in I Care a Lot isn't her face, but her hair, and it somehow tells us everything about her: a vanilla-blonde bob cut so blunt and so straight, it's as if a guillotine sliced right through it, before pausing at her neck with second thoughts. Mere minutes into J Blakeson's breezily nasty comic thriller, we rather wish it had gone all the way.
Marla, it turns out, is a sociopath to make Amy Elliott Dunne, the similarly put-together antihero Pike played in Gone Girl, look positively cuddly by comparison. Officially, she's a legal guardian, appointed by the state to manage the lives and assets of an ever-growing portfolio of pensioners; in reality, she's a grifting vulture with a killer manicure, filtering said assets into her own, and living lushly with her accomplice and girlfriend Fran (a fabulous Eiza Gonzalez) off the hustle. The title, you may have guessed, is ironic.
It's rare for a film to be built around a female protagonist this brazenly despicable. Blakeson's cold-blooded but hot-footed script isn't terribly preoccupied with locating Marla's redeeming features, wherever they might be. Rather, it dispassionately places us in her high-end sneakers and asks us how we might pull off her con, as one of her marks — wonderfully if all too briefly played by Dianne Wiest — proves a more slippery customer than expected. Somehow, Blakeson and Pike pull it off. In a very Marla-like move, they ask us not to care a lot for their monster, but to invest in her. Obliging viewers egg her on through the scrapes and complications that quite deservedly ensue; her crisp, butter-yellow pantsuit and ever-present e-cigarette inspire “yas queen” cheers despite ourselves, until a finale that makes us ask what we were rooting for, if anything at all. Filmmaking this perversely amoral is never going to be a crowdpleaser, and early responses have been aggressively divided, but I Care a Lot isn't out to be liked: like the best con artists, it gets you caught up in its strut.
I CARE A LOT (2020) Written by J Blakeson | Shot by Doug Emmett | Edited by Mark Eckersley