I Care a Lot

Rosamund Pike is a fantastic actor whose stand-up role up to this point has been the sociopathic Amy Donne in Gone Girl. It feels like Pike intentionally avoided playing a similar character for some time but I Care a Lot's Marla Grayson is Pike going full terrifyingly horrific. 

The premise is that Grayson is a woman who makes her living by convincing a judge that to appoint her guardianship over elderly people claiming they can no longer take care of themselves and then ships the people to care homes and sells their assets, taking a sizeable chunk for herself. Within only a few minutes of the film opening I found myself utterly hating her. She's in no way a likeable character and doesn't really have any redeeming features whatsoever. 

Grayson's latest elderly victim is Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Weist) but it turns out that Peterson has a secret son who is a dangerous criminal, Roman. Roman (Peter Dinklage) is the film's second utterly horrific character, though perhaps in a more traditional way than Grayson. Inevitably Roman goes after Grayson but, without going too much into spoilers, she refuses to backdown in the way you think she is going to. 

I'm sure some viewers struggle to connect with this film due to the fact that it's about two utterly irredeemable character coming up against one another. As a viewer you're never quite sure who you are routing for and I reached a point where I realised I didn't care but I wanted to see what happened to these characters. Dinklage is great but Pike is very much the star- I would argue that this is the best performance of her career. It helps that Grayson is just such a fantastic character and different from what we've seen before. She's almost a femme fatale but at no point does she ever use sex to get what she wants and she's pretty much non-violent too. 

The film is also an excellent satire on capitalism, social care and the American dream. It all feels horrifically plausible and Grayson's lines in court are convincing and indeed not even wrong in a scenario where the people genuinely can't care for themselves. The film certainly leave a bitter after-taste in the brain. 

Perhaps my biggest criticism is the ending. There's a conclusion to the conflict which I felt worked well and a few minutes is spent showing us the results but then in the final moments we are given a final ending which felt to me like it pandered to the audience a little, giving us the ending that we would want rather than the one we need. 

J Blakeson should be praised for his excellent script and direction here and I can't think of any other actor would could play Grayson as well as Rosamund Pike does. Perhaps not for everyone due to the fact that it's feature utterly horrific characters but I thought it was superb.