I Care A Lot - Review

  I Care A Lot is a dark comedy character study during late-stage capitalism that suffers from late-stage Gone Girlism.

  I don't just mean the type-casting of Rosamund Pike in another Amy Dunne role but it wants to say so much and only gives lip service to its satirical aspirations, focusing more on its twisty plotting. I hate to do this because, typically, these kinds of criticisms are made from critics who want something one-note and palatable, but, in the case of I Care A Lot, it applies: this movie is a tonal disaster.

  Writer/director J. Blakeson wants to be madcap and goofy, deadly serious, reflective, and satirical all at once. It should have aimed more in the realm of Bad Santa or Observe & Report, rather than fucking Nightcrawler. It's too silly for its own good and is bafflingly lit and saturated; the colors nauseatingly pop like Netflix said "make it look like a car commercial!" My ears are just as offended cuz its score is so distractingly out of place with how synthetic and spacey it is. Clearly someone heard Uncut Gems' score and thought "yeah, I wanna try that."

  There is a great movie here, if it were in more capable hands, but Blakeson has his characters yap a lot of eye-rollingly unfunny and sometimes downright stupid dialog - as if he aspires to weave words like Mamet and Tarantino but sometimes he's just gotta phone it in. It definitely tries to be funny but all it got out of me were the kind of wispy, dispiriting smirks that would make a comedian shrivel up on stage.

  And unlike Amazing Amy, Marla Grayson isn't complex nor as nasty an orchid. She's small-time everything; she's clever, ruthless, manipulative and determined for a con woman working her ground-level machinations on the elderly. About the only edge she has is that her feminist ra-ra'ing clashes with her capitalistic ambitions/successes. What I will give it is that it's not a simple-minded movie fetishizing the GirlBoss but showing her for the monster she is.

  Pike is predictably great and so is the rest of this woefully misused cast; Chris Messina, Diane Wiest, Peter Dinklage, and Macon Blair. Eliza Gonzalez is...present. Critics tend to write in broad cliches about roles like this, with shit like "she does the best with what she's given" but characterization is the most important part of a movie like this so I'm gonna dig the fuck in.

  Gonzalez gives just as much as the role asks of her, which ain't fuckin' much.

  She plays Marla's girlfriend, Fran, and she exists solely as Marla's girlfriend, Fran. I never once cared about their relationship because there's no dynamic here beyond the basics: she's in on Marla's small-time con enterprise and helps keep the money coming in. They have a system worked out, which means they've been at this long enough to trust one another and work well together. Marla recklessly wants more and puts Fran in danger by not saying 'when.' But Fran blithely goes along with Marla's schemes, even when their collective fan is covered in shit, but she seems more motivated by plot than anything interesting or substantive. They may be lesbians and Marla might spout a lot of pseudo-feminist lines about not being intimidated by men's threats but Fran is just as one-note as any Wifey mannequin in post-Breaking Bad entertainment. I want something more than prosaic dialog where Fran plays the Reactress partner, saying things like "this is dangerous" as if apprehension is all that's on her mind when, clearly, there's more that could have come out of her mouth.

   There's one scene where she seems irked when an old acquaintance calls her "Frankie" instead of Fran. I have to do my best to give her -some- characterization, so...my guess is that her full name is Franceska...that's all I got. So not only did Blakeson not give her any depth but he actively has to shrink her name, too. He really wanted to write less and less about her, didn't he? He cares a lot. 🙄

C-