Originally posted February, 2021
I Care a Lot, directed by J Blakeson, is the Netflix flavor of the week, and it isn’t good, but that’s almost besides the point. The movie isn’t trying to be good; it’s trying to be provocative. And since I’m writing this review, I suppose that in a way, it worked.
Rosamund Pike stars as Marla Grayson, a greedy scam artist who makes bank by usurping guardianship status of capable but vulnerable older folks. The point of this exposition is to make you question whether it could, in fact, happen—while betting that you’re too paranoid to reach the correct answer: no. Considering the movie’s popularity, however short lived it’ll surely turn out to be, the bet is well placed.
Supposedly, there’s also a feminist flavor to this film, which, according to its proponents, is owed to the unabashed nature of Grayson’s conniving; after all, men have been conniving unabashedly for decades, haven’t they now. But this kind of feminism has no aesthetic value, only historical. That Grayson has been intentionally drained of a soul—with even a haircut of inhuman severity—may make the movie notable, but not fun. How can we have fun watching a character who doesn’t seem capable of having it herself? At least Gordon Gekko enjoyed being rich.
And Grayson’s greediness is pushed so far that her actions begin to seem plainly stupid: even a money-hungry bitch, I imagine, would probably refrain from demanding ten million dollars from a mobster who has her bound up and is promising to kill her on the spot.
Peter Dinklage does his usual best as Pike’s counterpart, but he’s been given a lousy bit. Like Pike, he’s been cast as a cunning outlaw, but, also like Pike, he’s been failed by the screenwriters, who have no cunning to bequeath. For example, Dinklage’s character plots to extract his mother from Grayson’s imprisonment but strangely decides that the leader of this all-important mission will be…a random goon whom he almost murdered the day before for incompetence. (Even more strangely, the employees of the nursing home, who are not part of Grayson’s scheme, have loaded guns and lay heavy fire on the goons, who ostensibly only want to visit a resident.)
Netflix seems to be refining a sort of recipe for making movies. The ingredients are 1) a provocative premise, 2) one or two well-liked stars, 3) vague social commentary, 4) everything else in the movie being extremely lame. This formula gave us the highly popular Bird Box (2018) and its many descendants; it will certainly give us many more titles and content options well into the future. Because it seems that Netflix’s all-knowing algorithms have caught our streaming population red-handed: we pick movies based on their trailers, don’t pay much attention while watching them, and don’t remember much of what we’ve seen. With new releases appearing on our TV sets, we’ve become vulnerable to movie clickbait, and I Care a Lot is only the latest to fleetingly pique our collective interest.
–Jim Andersen
For more on Netflix films, see my review of The Tinder Swindler.