I Care A Lot Pushes The Limits Of Karmic Justice In A Film
The inventive thriller will leave you anxiously questioning the when, how, and why we root for some characters
Tristan Young @talltristan
This Movie was released fairly recently so we’re going to throw up a spoiler warning
It’s wild to think that there was once a time when anti-heroes were narratively ambitious. That the idea of framing a character as ethically compromised but also as a protagonist to root for was considered riské. Now it is clearly the well-explored province of seemingly any genre of film, long since relegated to useful if somewhat tedious cliché. And yet with this archetype, there is still opportunity to push the boundaries of their context and conduct even if a story must travel to the increasingly barren hinterlands of what is narratively acceptable in terms of a character whose goals are supposed to align with the viewers hopes and expectations. Even now there is still space to be shocked, appalled, furiously agitated, and yet strangely compelled by a story’s hero, in the loosest sense of such a banal word. I Care A Lot makes this point with defiant audacity. It builds a world around the mendacity and duplicity of truly abhorrent person; one who relishes in her apostasy and the privilege it affords her to frustratingly egregious extents. Its main character, played with confrontational ire and moral dismissiveness by Rosamund Pike, will engender nothing but vitriol and frustration in the viewer towards her- she is a monster. Somehow, however, the film still manages to slowly and steadily win you over to her side, despite your best intentions and even your moral aversion to the very notion of doing so. This perspective transformation is a remarkable narrative accomplishment and demands further insight and analysis.
Released in 2020 I Care A Lot is a timely parable for the anaemic infrastructure and rampant corruption & complacency that corrodes the American health care system. It is an incisive and direct critique on how neglect and profiteering, masquerading as good will in the laziest of manners, has been normalized and institutionalized as the standard operating procedure for how the wealthiest country on the planet cares for some of its most needy and vulnerable. All of this is of course a very basic surface level reading of a film that does not try to obscure its intentions, however the thematic bent of the film takes a back seat to the fictional and hyperbolic delineations of its story. You’re more likely to be enthralled and incensed by the charter study at the center of the film than its exterior and prosaic commentary on real life issues. The character at the center of that story is Marla Grayson, whose job as she succinctly and sanctimoniously states, is to care. She operates as court appointed guardian, her ostensible function is to step in and manage the health, living conditions, and assets of elderly and infirmed citizens whom the court deems as incapable of taking care of themselves.
The reality of her business model is far more insidious than her tightly manicured performative altruism would suggest. Rather than being agnostic to who is deemed in need of help, she has an elaborate web of conspirators spread throughout the health care system to game the judicial process and corruptly enrich themselves. Working in collusion with a crooked health care facility operator and an even more crooked doctor, Grayson identifies wealthy senior citizens with as few family connections as possible and tricks the courts into erroneously deeming them unfit to take care of themselves under the falsehood of an emergency hearing in which the target person is neither invited to nor informed of. From there Grayson has the legal and institutional authority to literally kidnap these people from their homes, with the help of actual cops, trap them in a care facility with no access to phones or internet and sedate them with medication. Once the elderly target is effectively neutralized and exiled, Grayson sells off all their assets and even their home under the auspices of compensation.
Later on in the story things go severely sideways for Grayson and her assistant/lover Fran (Eiza González) when they take on their latest ward against her will, a seemingly placid and wealthy widower named Jennifer (Dianne Wiest). Grayson and her network of grifters take careful measures to ensure those they victimize are with as few familial complications as possible, however in this case they did not fully comprehend the opacity of Jennifer’s seemingly benign family history. When ensnaring Jennifer in their web of predation sets of a calamitous chain of events involving unknown and dangerous parties, Grayson must purpose her parasitic proclivities, normally so finely tuned to the world of systemic bureaucracy, towards dangers with far more visceral and life threatening implications.
Watching I Care A Lot will make your blood boil. It’s not just the craven depths of wickedness Grayson willingly and gleefully succumbs to in her pursuit of nothing more than trivial wealth, it’s the institutional ease in which she operates; How simply she just gets away with it. Bored and lazy judges, easily corrupted physicians, victims with no legal recourse, abductions carried out by law enforcement all operating under the verisimilitude of caring. It’s absolutely enraging just how easy it all is for Grayson, how successful she is in her perpetual cons. Plenty of movies or stories characterize the conduct of a person, even a main character as onerous, but it’s the systemic and cultural factors that make the agitation that Grayson sparks so salient. In contrast, a character like a serial killer, or bounty hunter, or some other person operating far outside the bounds of morality or legality could be considered objectively worse than Grayson, but they usually operate within contexts that acknowledge how problematic they are. Those acknowledgements are willingly suppressed in I Care A Lot. Her contexts are those of being celebrated by the system she perverts and it makes her conduct agonizingly more frustrating. Furthermore, a hypothetical character doing terrible or illegal things would likely have an assortment of roadblocks to attempt to thwart them- laws, cops, a society that shuns or fears them. Instead all of those institutions, legal or cultural, actually aide and abet her misanthropy. She weaponizes the appearance of good will that casts her insatiable greed as humanitarian. In this regard the film taps into a particular realm of fury and indignation, the avenues of which are rarely explored by other movies that are often barely even cognizant of such opportunities. This makes I Care A Lot, vexing as it purposely strives to be, highly stimulating and engaging.
Grayson is painted with detailed dimensions in her characterization, but all of them coming from an explicitly nihilistic variety. This is no more apparent than during a tense confrontation with another character that occupies a different kind of malignancy. When describing her motivations, the end point to which her reductive worldview will one day lead her, it all just pertains to getting rich. “I want to be rich… I want to be very fucking rich… enough to be able to use money as a weapon, like a bludgeon… that’s what I want”. For the un-navigable labyrinth of bureaucracy and byzantine rules that would prevent any legal recourse from stopping her, all she simply wants is money. There is no hidden family member she is trying to save, no crushing debt she will do anything to escape out from under; the only hint of a back story is she cares nothing for her alleged sociopath of a mother, perhaps the only elderly individual whose affairs she dose have some business being involved with.
Watching the film will inspire ire and consternation that few films are capable of eliciting with such command, and the reasons for that are somewhat more sub textual, relating to something that can broadly and roughly be described as karmic justice. A story’s narration need not be constrained by a main character only doing good or behaving righteously. Plenty of iconic stories focus on the happenings of through and through malcontents. Furthermore, a story of such kind need not even necessarily force any kind of retribution or reckoning onto said character- they can get away with it and it can still be a very satisfying story. Putting aside the limits of literal justice in a fictional story, the idea of karmic justice relates more to what the writers of a story not so much want to convey, but are aware of. There are plenty of direct or subliminal avenues to communicate that even if a dastardly character faces no kind of recompense, the creators of the fictional universe they exist in acknowledge what they are doing is wrong. Vox recently had an excellent piece on how WandaVision failed to balance the scales of karmic justice in its finale by inserting lines into the episode that basically absolved Wanda of wrong doing in the eyes of the writers. I Care A Lot interacts with and interprets the role and limits of karmic justice in fascinating ways. It takes the many indirect avenues in which a story could signal that she is a monster- such as how society views her, the limits of her success, frail moments of interiority in which she grapples with the deeply hurtful nature of her conduct- and it supresses and circumvents them. Society holds her on a pedestal as she flat out brags about how horrible she is. In doing so the writers invert the function of how karmic justice operates. The main character directly admits their heinous moral fibre, while everything around her cheers her on.
So why then, by the end of the film are we maybe just a little bit rooting for her? It’s not because the people she inadvertently picked a fight with people who are even more vile- it’s far more interesting than that. One of the few elements of societal push back Grayson does receive is actually instrumental in understanding the delicate manipulation the film adroitly implements to endear you to her. Early on the film she rhetorically outmanoeuvres a person in court whose mother she has indentured with demoralizing finesse. After the court has ruled against this man in favour of Grayson, he goes off on her in a vicious verbal assault that involves him spitting in her face. It doesn’t matter that he was right about her machinations, the gendered dimensions of this interaction cannot be ignored, in that this is in no uncertain terms assault he committed on her. The point of the scene is not to artificially engender sympathy towards her, but to highlight the misogynistic angel that women in her position are often viewed from. Consider our perception of a man doing what she does. It might not be from the position of ruinous and marauding con artist, but a fierce, take no prisoner corporate vulture- something much more normalized. Would we view this behaviour as quite so disgusting if it was just a typical male sleaze bag in suit doing it- would the assailed parties view it differently? Does the notion that Grayson can intact so much prodigious control over the men that pathetically try to stand in her way color how we look at the rest of her conduct, even though it shouldn’t? She has gamed a systems largely designed and operated by men, both legally and illegally, while dressed in pastel power suits. The film hyper accentuates the disconnect ingrained in our society of a women asserting herself and automatically being viewed as pushy or aggressive, just because she is not a man. Perhaps the disdain we feel towards her is a mixture of feeling threatened by a fictional person, and coming to understand that her brazenly confrontational demeanour is in fact a product of her own experiences with violence and misogyny. “You know how many times I’ve been threatened by a man”, she recalls, “Thousands. You know how many times they’ve come to anything? Two.” The multiplexing sexism that exists contained within her story and beyond in a meta-narrative level challenges the viewer to question the totality of their animus against her.
As the film crosses its half way point and it becomes apparent that Grayson inadvertently has crossed a bunch of Russian gangsters, one’s initial response may be to root for someone- anyone- to finally take her down a notch; to hoist her by her own petard in the literary parlance. Yet with each interaction between her and the varying cohorts of this criminal enterprise, it’s more and more impressive that Grayson keeps her head above water. She is a shark in the world of pseudo corporate espionage and legal subterfuge, but in the arena of life or death and guns and torture, she is seemingly as inept as any other typical person. However, she refuses to behave as such, or more importantly to be seen as such. At first it seems obnoxious, with her hubris on full display, as she boldly claims, “I don’t lose”, to an adversary representative of the larger threat she has irresponsibly not even bothered to fully comprehend. Eventually that grit and determination slowly wins you over. Grayson, in her obstinate desire to frustrate all on her growing list of enemies by simply refusing to die becomes more and more emblematic of that distinctly American idea of exceptionalism and manifest destiny. These are unmistakably arrogant concepts, therefore she is a perfect conduit to embody them. No matter what the mob throws at her, she refuses to go down. After an attempt on her life, her principle concern is recovering and repairing a broken tooth- because aesthetics are still important in her line of work- and then getting sweet bloody revenge. That staunch determination is an admittedly unorthodox articulation of the aphorism you can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it- but it works.
This tenant, more so even than her omnivorous greed becomes the thesis behind Grayson’s id. Even threatened with imminent torture and death, cut off from all the typical vectors she has to manipulate a situation, she is no less resolute. “To make it in this country you need to brave. And stupid. And ruthless and focused. Cause playing fair, be sacred- that get’s you nowhere. That gets you beat”. Her commitment to such an ideology, even in the face of oblivion, even if it directly leads to that oblivion, takes a level of will and fortitude that most of us would not be capable of mustering. It makes her dangerous, and yes she uses it in abhorrent ways, but it also makes her just a touch admirable. That even without having the means or knowhow to murder her way out of a situation full of murderers, she manages to bend all events to her will into an outcome that is largely advantageous to her. In a world besieged by immiseration and corruption on macro scales, to see someone so fully exert control over their own universe carries that Americana ideal of controlling one’s destiny better than many narratives that attempt such a thing along more traditional lines.
That fact that she eventually does pay for her wickedness and is gunned down in the epilogue is somewhat immaterial. Sure, in the grandest of schemes she faces tangible consequences eventually, but within the tighter scope of the context of the main story, she overcomes the odds. She games the system, outmanoeuvres the mafia, and comes out richer and more powerful than before. By the end of the film our relationship with Grayson has changed in ways we likely did not anticipate, or even want. But once we reach that point, where the gap between her moral compass and our own has been narrowed ever so slightly, we begin to see things her way just a touch. Not to the extent that any rational person would ever condone the horrible things she does to innocent senior citizens, but when it comes to her worldview, and the optics of what she believes she is up against, shades of understanding are possible. It’s hard not to root, just a little, for a person who has the brevity to sum up so perfectly the toxicity of a male dominated society she is happy to take down from the inside: “If you can’t convince a woman to do what you want, then you call her a bitch and threaten to kill her. I’m not scared of him”.