Pike shines in darkly delicious noir romp
I CARE A LOT ★★★★ Cert TBC, Amazon Prime from Friday
‘America’s not a country. It’s just a business.” That was the memorable quote from Brad Pitt’s jaded hitman in the 2012 crime-noir Killing Them Softly. It is a line that comes to mind watching I Care a Lot, a dark-spirited corporate thriller about scamming the elderly out of their assets via mostly legal channels. The coldness of this type of white-collar crime is almost as shocking as any killing because it is mundane, insidious, and all too imaginable.
Writer-director J Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed) shows us a cut-throat modern America and asks us which type of criminal we trust more — the one operating right under your nose with the backing of a broken system, or the one dressed in black with hired goons.
On the one side, we have our protagonist and anti-hero Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike in Golden Globe-nominated form). She is a shyster legal guardian who runs a very slick racket via the family courts in order to get her greedy mitts on the wealth and assets of the elderly. She does this through phoney health assessments (procured with bribery from a doctor) and subsequent court order stating that the old-timer is to be placed into a home for their own benefit. Of course, Marla’s care home means soft-handed incarceration where the victim is drugged into a stupor and deprived of outside communication.
It is a very chilling crime to consider, and although Marla is the type of sassy, independent woman we’re told the world needs more of, she is a monster in lipstick and designer heels. Blakeson does a good job of not allowing us to entirely forget that, even when she is the centre of the film’s story and the place from which we view all narrative events. Marla’s smooth scam meets a significant roadblock when she and business partner/ lover Fran (Eiza González) get their talons into Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest, of Parenthood and Edward Scissorhands fame). After being carted off to the care home, Marla discovers a stash of diamonds in Jennifer’s safety deposit box.
Meanwhile, a taxi turns up to Jennifer’s house while it is being stripped and redecorated for resale by Fran and her team. After being sent on his way, the taxi driver goes straight to Jennifer’s son Roman (Peter Dinklage), a mob boss who is not pleased to learn that his beloved mother has been preyed upon and incarcerated against her will.
So callous is Marla’s crime that you almost hope Roman has some success in fixing her wagon. But this is America, where one man’s white-collar crook is another’s canny go-getter. Marla won’t give up all she has worked for and challenges Roman and his Scaramucci-esque lawyer (Chris Messina) to come at her by way of the judge (Isaiah Whitlock Jr), who, of course, has been charmed into thinking Marla is an angel. She is facing a new style of enemy, however, and to paraphrase Mike Tyson, her plan to outwit Roman and continue to drain his mother of her wealth might only last until she gets punched in the mouth.
It all gets lined up with finger-clicking precision towards a rather delicious finale that, depending on your view of things, will either be just as it should be in a world as mad and bad as this, or a tragic injustice.
This slight ambiguity of morals makes I Care a Lot a more interesting and thought-provoking prospect than we are perhaps used to. It’s comedy-noir tone is light on outright laughs but there is plenty of caperish fun. Horrid people do battle, and almost everyone orbiting them — the lawyers, the doctors, the hospital staff — is on the take. Whoever wins, we lose, so you might as well accept that your money is yours until someone comes along to swipe it off you. Lions and lambs, to use Marla’s analogy.
Pike is excellent value for her Golden Globe nomination, channelling a whiff of that Mephistophelean Gone Girl scourge behind a flawless businesswoman façade. That we are almost able to sympathise with her is her coup here and a likely factor should more doffs of the cap come her way this award season. There is decent screen chemistry between her and González too, and this is important to give Marla’s character some sense of skin in the game, that she has something to lose.
Dinklage smoulders and seethes, while Wiest is a welcome sight in anything these days.
MAX WINSLOW & THE HOUSE OF SECRETS VOD from February 15 ★★★
Despite the Harry Potter-esque name, this American film is really a vaguely techy cross between Willy Wonka and The Breakfast Club. It’s perfectly serviceable and rather tame, a good, safe watch for tweens complete with expository ballads.
An Arkansas suburb’s biggest claim to fame is that it produced tech genius and gazillionaire Atticus Virtue (Chad Michael Murray). Breaking every data protection law ever, Virtue picks five students from his old high school. They will spend the night in his home, solving puzzles to win points, the winner will get to keep the house. The five kids are computer genius Max (Sydne Mikelle), sensitive jock Connor (Tanner Buchanan), a social media queen (Jade Chynoweth), a gamer (Jason Genao) and a bully (Emery Kelly).
When Virtue cannot make his rendezvous with his guests, they are left in the capable, if invisible, hands of the AI house manager (Marina Sirtis) who sounds charming, but is she?
There is a moral to the story which is fine. The issue, as with Willy Wonka, is that the arbiter of that morality is self-appointed. But that sums up the film, it’s grand, just don’t think about it too much.
MUSIC VOD from February 15 ★★
Musician Sia’s first film, which she has directed and co-written with Dallas Clayton, arrives amid controversy. Sia has said that her intentions were “awesome” but she has also apologised and promised to cut scenes that have caused offence to many on the autism spectrum.
Zu (Kate Hudson) has just got sober when she finds out that she will be responsible for her younger half-sister, Music (Sia muse Maddie Ziegler). Music is on the autism spectrum (Ziegler is not, which was one objection) and has very specific care needs. Zu is unused to thinking of anyone, let alone caring for them. It is her neighbour Ebo (Leslie Odom Jr) who will show her the way. Included in this is a demonstration of how to restrain a person on the spectrum when they become upset, and it is this that has caused most outrage.
On a purely cinematic level, the film is simplistic. Despite being intercut with extremely Sia-esque singing and dancing vignettes, the story is all too familiar and the script very ropey. Hudson does what she can with a cliché.
But it will be popular and will no doubt find an audience.
TO OLIVIA Sky Cinema from February 19 ★★★★
Today’s fun fact is that Roald
Dahl was six feet and six inches, around two metres tall. That imposing height occasionally comes across in John Hay’s film, but really it is a story of depths. The plunge into despair following the loss of a child and where that can take a parent, a couple and an entire family. Inevitably downbeat in parts, and a relatively low-energy film, it’s an admirably non-hagiographic take on a beloved author.
In the 1950s Roald Dahl (Hugh Bonneville, who is six foot one, if you’re interested) was a moderately successful children’s author. He was living in Buckinghamshire with his American film star wife Patricia Neal (Keeley Hawes) and their three young children. We meet him working on Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory. Neal is supporting them as best she can when disaster strikes and their seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, dies. She was Dahl’s clear favourite and he copes badly, indeed selfishly, in a way that threatens to pull his whole world down.
A film about grief inevitably touches some people deeply, but this is more about the psychology of loss than the feeling of it. The cast are good and the story interesting, it is just a little chilly.