I Care A Lot (2020)
Review of I Care A Lot (2020), directed by J Blakeson.
Before watching this movie, I’d been seeing the poster around quite a bit. I finally became active on Letterboxd, especially in the lists where I was scouring for films that had stronger female leads. I didn’t read the plot of this movie at all before going into it, but the poster particularly intrigued me. Ever since watching The Neon Demon, neon tones become a mysterious sense of danger. That’s all I got before starting this film a day after my birthday, and oh man I was right. This film truly is a wild ride, and let’s get right into it.
Content
Our main character in this film is Marla Grayson, a conwoman who convinces the legal system to give her legal guardianship of vulnerable old people. Once she’s their guardian, she locks them away in elderly facilitates and steals everything they own, cashing in on the profit of their assets and properties. The motion of this film is set once one of the men she’s a guardian for dies, and she discovers a new prospective client. She’s a wealthy, supposedly independent woman, who seems like the key person to exploit. And they do so.
But then it turns out this woman is heavily connected to the mafia, something out characters seem highly unaware of from the beginning. She seems like a normal old woman whose been convinced she is no longer stable, thus needing a guardian, and then the puzzle pieces slowly begin to come together, shifting this from a more comedic light tone into thriller territory.
This film has its moments. It’s a comedic thriller, and there’s some pretty good beats of comedy in this film. I genuinely cracked some smiles at some scenes, despite the heaviness of the topics. This is a film about exploitation and late stage capitalism, and then it turns into a gay film. I absolutely screamed once we got into “we’re lesbians” part of the film, because I did not see this coming at all. I genuinely thought they were just boss and assistant and then they weren’t.
There’s some hole in the scripts, but I thought it was fine since the actual film managed to captivate me and keep my attention going. It’s a black comedy, it’s a queer film, and it’s got some decent cinematic elements to it. The acting, too, is also quite good.
Rosamund Pike as Marla Grayson is the star of the show. Despite her being highly unethical in her career (it’s established right from the start that she is a conwoman, so this isn’t really a spoiler), her outfits, her look, and her confidence all is absolutely killer. I absolutely wanted to be her throughout the film, minus the shitty career move. I recently cut my hair as short as hers, in the same exact style, and I absolutely want to emulate her going forward. As she says: “Am I a lamb or I a lion,” I was like oh no, this foreshadowing.
Overall Thoughts
I came out of this movie with a crush on Rosamund Pike and her assistant both, played by Eliza Gonzalez, an appreciation for the wardrobe efforts that came into this movie, and a love for the shots. The cinematography was great in this one y’all, especially with the ambiance created by light as well as sound decisions. I thought this was a great, highly entertaining movie, and I recommend it for the masses. Pike was the star of the show, but the acting was solid all around at the end of the day. It also shows how the real world tends to be; the unethical get on top through dodgy means, which seems insane, but it’s reality.
