21/02/21

Amazon Prime

The ‘carer’ in this story is Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike), a woman who – it soon becomes clear – cares only for herself and her lover, Fran (Eliza Gonzalez). Exploiting the law by bribing doctors, Marla has become adept at identifying vulnerable elderly people and getting herself appointed as their legal guardian, whereupon she is free to exploit them for her own profit. She gleefully sells off their homes, their possessions, the little treasures they have accumulated over the years, paying herself a healthy wage from the proceeds and siphoning off whatever she thinks she can get away with.

If it all seems a bit far-fetched, think again. In America, such shenanigans are perfectly permissible and writer/director J Blakeson has no hesitation in pointing up the iniquities of the system.

Marla sets her sights on her latest victim: rich loner, Jennifer Paterson (Dianne Wiest). Before Jennifer quite knows what’s happening to her, she is drugged up and incarcerated in a care home. It’s at this point that Marla realises she may have bitten off more than she can chew. The records state that Jennifer has no kin, but it turns out she actually has a secret son, Roman (Peter Dinklage), a man who – though small in stature – is a powerful and ruthless criminal, who will stop at nothing to get his beloved momma back.

I Care a Lot has a great deal going for it, not least what could be a career-best performance from Pike, whose portrayal of Marla is extraordinary. She paints her as a venomous, heartless machine, able to mask her raging avarice behind a dazzling smile and a haircut of such precision it looks like it’s been achieved using a set square. Wiest is pretty good too, but she’s criminally under-used here, which is a shame, because she has been gifted with the film’s finest one-liner. And Dinklage also convinces as a ruthless mafioso, a man you really don’t want to get on the wrong side of.

The main problem for me however, is that there’s really nobody in this story to root for, since every character I’m introduced to is as venal and self-centred as the last. Even Jennifer isn’t the innocent she at first appears to be. It really says something when the people on the right side of the law are even viler than those who are openly flouting it, but it’s not enough for me. I find myself wanting a character – just one – that I can actually relate to.

The film’s middle section boils down to a series of complicated tussles between Marla and Roman, both of them intent on beating the other at all costs. Though these scenes are cleverly staged, they are somehow less interesting than the film’s central tenet. However, just when I think it’s all going off the rails, Blakeson manages to snatch everything back with a conclusion that comes swaggering in out of left field and actually leaves me gasping. I really don’t see it coming.

I Care a Lot isn’t perfect, but when it’s good, it’s very good and – for the best part of its nearly two hours’ running time – it does manage to keep me glued to the screen. It also makes me rage with anger at what can happen to elderly people locked up in the moral maze of the American health care system.

4 stars

Philip Caveney