Delayed Reaction: I Care a Lot

Premise: An elder care guardian con woman (Rosamund Pike) cons the wrong elderly woman and suffers the consequences.

 

It was nice, the degree to which I didn't realize what kind of movie this was. I knew the part about Pike playing a woman, Marla, who cons judges into giving her guardianship of elders in order to rob their estates blind. I didn't realize that is turns into a health care reverse-John Wick. I even thought this was a failed Oscar play. While I'm sure some people will try to see this as a lurking contender, it's really not.

 

This movie is a lot of fun. It starts off running us through Marla's whole scheme, from finding the morally compromised doctor who will declare an elderly patient incompetent to take care of themselves, to selling off all their property, and ultimately to trapping them in a nursing home with no method to communicate to the outside world. At that point, I'm expecting this to be a movie about maybe a nosey reporter or someone exposing her. Instead, the movie jumps right to the Russian mob. From there, it's a movie about a battle of wits between Marla and Peter Dinklage as the Russian mob boss.

 

While Rosamund Pike is a wonderfully talented actress who can do many things, it's clear that her default role has become these perfectly composed monsters like in this or Gone Girl. There's something about how perfectly each hair is in place in this that told me everything I needed to know about Marla. This isn't quite as nuanced a role as in Gone Girl, since she's pretty much just a villain. I'm always a fan of roles that Peter Dinklage gets just because he's a good actor. It's fun because he's a villain too, just in a different way: imposing despite his size. Dianne Wiest is wonderful as Dinklage's mother who is put into Marla's nursing home. I love seeing how she slowly reveals herself. Initially, she's just a nice, confused old lady, then she brings BDE when she realizes that Marla doesn't know who she's messing with.

 

I think the plausibility of Marla's racket dulled a lot of my entertainment with the movie. Too often I thought about if this could happen to me in 40 years, which worried me to the point of not focusing on the movie. This might be too real. And the movie lost me toward the end when it starts getting into a lot of the "capitalist America is one big scheme" stuff. I got that before they spelled it out. More importantly, I wish this battle of wits had a little more intentionality to it. Too many beats felt lucky or random to really be pleased with how well matched the two were. It's a fun movie though. Pike, Dinklage, Wiest, and the rest of the surprisingly familiar cast are quite good. I like the angle the movie came at the story from. I certainly wouldn't mind if Rosamund Pike starting making movies like these the way that Liam Nesson keeps making the same gritty revenge movies. Give me a Rosamund Pike sociopath extended universe.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend