Killer lawyers! Bilked old people!
BQB here with a review of Netflix’s latest movie, I Care A Lot.
Lately, I’ve had misgivings about Netflix. IMO, there’s a few good series and a lot of schlocky filler. They tend to do movies wrong, putting a lot of star power into flicks with scripts that sound like they were written in crayon by hobos on the back of an old piece of cardboard.
But this one was pretty good.
Rosamund Pike wowed us in Gone Girl, but has apparently been typecast as evil women now. Here, she stars as an evil lawyer with her own corrupt guardianship business. The court appoints her to run the lives of elderly people who have no one to look after them. To the casual observer, it appears she is doing a good deed by managing the assets of the elderly, using them to pay for their care in nursing homes and making tough decisions about their health care.
But she’s also profiting big time, seeing old folks as marks, even going so far as to have Jennifer Peterson, a robust old wealthy retired businesswoman who gets along just fine and has all of her wits about her, declared bonkers just so she can put the old woman’s moolah into her pocket.
Ahh, but while so many old folks have fallen victim to Marla’s scam before with no recourse available (she works with a corrupt nursing home to make sure her old charges are kept like prisoners, unable to complain to anyone about their ill treatment and/or that they are being robbed blind), Peterson’s son is a powerful gangster in the form of Peter Dinklage.
And thus, a war breaks out, with Pike and Dinklage trying to one up each other, going to extreme lengths to bring one another down, all in the name of ill gotten loot.
The movie is confusing in that it is hard to find a hero to root for and ultimately, there isn’t one. Pike’s character has a schtick about how people who play by the rules are suckers and getting rich means having to do bad things. That seems rather jaded and surely all rich people aren’t corrupt…right? Right? IDK. Perhaps it feels that way in the decade since Madoff and all the corporate scandals of the late 2000s that led to negative effects for the economy.
Personally, I found myself rooting for Dinklage. He does play a bad person who does bad for a living, but at the same time, it’s kind of glorious that after a lifetime spent bilking old folks out of their money, Marla messes with the wrong old person, someone with a loved one capable of messing back.
The film does give the viewer pause about the guardianship industry. On the one hand, surely not all guardians are corrupt…right? Right? IDK. Surely, many if not most are just good attorneys who manage the assets and affairs of people who can’t do it themselves. Even so, the system, any kind of system, sucks and be it the healthcare system, the legal system, the justice system, or what have you, it’s best to stay out of it for as long as you can because once you’re in it, you’re just a statistic that is passed around blindly, subjected to a vast sea of bureaucracy and rarely treated as an individual. Maybe it’s never too early to set up a plan and spell out legally who takes care of you when you can’t take care of yourself…and also eat your Wheaties because you’re the only one you can truly trust to take care of yourself.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy.
Bookshelf Battle 