The Many Cruelties of <em>I Care A Lot</em>

Rosamund Pike plays Marla Grayson, a con artist whose grift is particularly cruel: She bribes a doctor into declaring elderly people unable to look after themselves, then becomes their court-appointed legal guardian. Marla is savvy and severe, but her greatest skill as a scammer is her knowledge of the countless ways that legal and health-care bureaucracies leave the elderly and disabled vulnerable. Under the guise of protecting her patients, Marla easily persuades doctors to alter their medications and isolate them from the loved ones who might guard them from her ploy. The movie’s message is clear: Marla may be remarkably evil, but these intersecting systems already enable the abuse of elders, people who have disabilities, and anyone else who doesn’t have the legal or societal power to fight back.

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When Marla arrives at the lovely home of Jennifer Peterson (played by Dianne Wiest) to inform Jennifer that the court has ordered her to a care facility, it doesn’t matter that Jennifer insists that she’s perfectly capable of looking after herself. A few flashes of court documentation—and a quick nod to the police standing by—make clear that Jennifer is powerless to stop the impending takeover of her life and her finances. “She sounds a bit more like a prisoner than a guest,” another character later observes of Jennifer’s existence inside the facility. The film’s central scheme takes some unexpected twists: Without giving away too much, Peter Dinklage plays a menacing figure who comes to Jennifer’s defense, causing a wrinkle in Marla’s typically smooth operation. But even accounting for a handful of grisly action sequences, I Care a Lot’s most disturbing moments are the ones in which institutional violence seems far more threatening than any one person, no matter how steely his gaze or heartless her mission.

Unlike earlier films that focus on the psychological toll victims suffer, I Care a Lot emphasizes how systemic injustices can be maneuvered specifically to generate personal profit. After all, a single diagnosis can be enough to revoke someone’s basic rights under the guise of medical care, and all it takes is one conniving person to exploit those missing protections. Watching Marla deploy her femininity to nefarious ends, it’s immediately tempting to see an extension of Pike’s most famous role, Gone Girl’s Amy. Both women orchestrate diabolical schemes enabled in part by racist, sexist perceptions of white women’s perpetual innocence. Even Pike has nodded to the overlaps between the two: “I do think they would be two interesting women to get in a room together,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “I don’t think they would like each other very much at all.”

The characters have wildly different motivations, though: The titular woman in Gillian Flynn’s 2014 thriller seeks interpersonal damages, not wealth. I Care a Lot’s Marla, meanwhile, is a merciless capitalist villain. “To make it in this country, you need to be brave—and stupid and ruthless and focused,” she says during one climactic confrontation. “Because playing fair, being scared, that gets you nowhere. That gets you beat.”