Wow. I Care a Lot, written and directed by English filmmaker J. Blakeson and starring Rosamund Pike, Eliza Gonzalez, Peter Dinklage and Oscar winner Dianne Wiest, is one of the best films I have seen of late.
It is almost as good as Emerald Fennell’s A Promising Young Woman, which I think will be in Oscar contention. And, when it comes to an exploration of our moral and ethical framework, it is even darker and bleaker than that dark, bleak film about “date” rape and revenge.
Indeed, I think it should be called a horror story. It is certainly a story for our times. It is about power: how to get it for yourself and how to take it away from others. It is about money. It is about exploiting the vulnerable.
In one scene, an expensive, shifty lawyer (an excellent Chris Messina) tells the main character, Marla Grayson (Pike), that she is living the American dream in this day and age. This is what he is talking about: making money by ripping off the elderly.
The movie opens with a voiceover from Marla in which she laughs off the idea that “working hard and playing fair leads to success and happiness”.
She says there are only two types of people in the world: predator and prey. “My name is Marla Grayson and I am not a lamb. I am a f--king lioness.”
We move to a courtroom and see the lioness in action. Red dress, red lipstick, sharp blonde fringe. This is what she does: she convinces an easy-to-convince family court judge (Isiah Whitlock Jr) to make her the legal guardian of elderly people, even ones with relatives. She targets the rich, the ones she can fleece of everything they own.
“This is what I do all day, every day: I care,’’ she tells the judge. She protects the elderly from “apathy, from their pride and sometimes from their own children”. She does this with the co-operation of doctors and nursing home administrators. They are on her payroll.
Outside the courthouse, she is confronted by the son of a woman in her “care”. She laughs him off, too. ‘‘Having a penis doesn’t make you more scary than me.”
Then we see her in her office, standing in front of a wall full of headshot photographs of her “clients”. It looks like an investigation room from a police series. She receives a call informing her one of them has died. She is disappointed, for commercial reasons. “I only had him six months. I thought he’d last five years.” That “milk cow” stopped producing too soon.
Her disappointment evaporates when her business partner and lover, Fran (Gonzalez), comes in with news of a “bona fide cherry”: a rich elderly woman with no husband, no children, no living relatives. Her name is Jennifer Petersen (Wiest). Marla checks the details and says, “Pull the trigger on Jennifer Petersen.”
All of this happens in the first 20 minutes of this gripping 118-minute film. Everything that happens feels so close to possible that it is unnerving. You will want to put it in the This Can’t be True box. Pike, who has been nominated for a Golden Globe, is remarkable in this portrayal of a deeply horrible person.
And this is only the start. Wiest just about steals the show as the woman removed from her home and imprisoned in a nursing home. No phone, no visitors.
The legal guardian calls all the shots.
And then a man enters the story and the movie moves into full drama. I will not say his name because we are now at the point where plot spoilers — this is a thriller with twists upon twists — must be avoided.
Let’s just say that the cut and jib of this man (Dinklage, best known as the dwarf Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones), made me think of a very short Rasputin. We soon learn he has a connection to Jennifer Petersen, and that she is not quite who she seems.
When Marla asks her to own up to who she is, the old woman looks at her calmly and says quietly, “I am the worst mistake you’ll ever make.”
I thought she might be a Nazi. Early on, Marla says, of the elderly in general, “Even sadistic, immoral assholes get old.” Whether I was right is for viewers to find out.
This is a film that will keep viewers guessing through. The script is excellent, especially the dialogue. Marla says she wants to make a fortune so she can “use money as a weapon like real rich people do”. The acting is superb. The ending is a shock.
And this bit is uncommon. I think most if not all viewers will hope that the characters cop what the deserve. Not just Marla and Fran and the dodgy doctors and corrupt aged home administrators, but all of them.
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Malcolm & Marie (MA15+)
Netflix
★★★★
There is a lot to say about the extraordinary love-hate drama Malcolm & Marie, directed by Sam Levinson and starring John David Washington, who we last saw as the lead in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, and the singer-actor Zendaya, who will be familiar as Peter Parker’s love interest in the latest Spider-Man movies.
First up, if you have ever had an argument with your spouse – and who hasn’t? – then I hope you haven’t had one like the verbal stoush in this 106-minute black and white film, which features just the two actors, who are in perfect control of a script where every word matters.
The comparable films that come to mind are Noah Baumbach’s recent Marriage Story and, even closer, Mike Nichol’s 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Malcolm (Washington) is a film director. His girlfriend, Marie, is a former drug addict turned model and actor. They have been together for five years, from the time he “saved” her.
It’s 1am and they have returned home from the premiere of Malcolm’s new film, which is about a young woman trying to kick drugs. It’s the movie that is going to make this black filmmaker the next Spike Lee or Barry Jenkins.
He pours a drink and puts on some music. She smokes and makes him macaroni cheese. They are in black tie attire, which loosens in tandem with them hating and loving each other. Each is peeled, sometimes with hard-to-think-about cruelty, of layer after layer of emotional skin.
It starts with Marie asking Malcolm why he did not thank her in his acceptance speech. She did not act in the movie, but it is based on her life. And it goes on from there. I would say this film is a depth charge, as Malcolm and Marie sink and sink until an explosion is inevitable, but if I did Malcolm would call me a “dumbass” white critic. I’d also say this film is authentic, except he would tear my dumbass white head off for that one.
There are three remarkable set piece speeches. A highlight, for this critic, is Malcolm’s response to the Los Angeles Times review of his film, which goes online about 2am. It’s a rave review by a white critic and Malcolm shreds it line-by-line. (The director of this film, by the way, is white, which is interesting given its merciless dissection of white “understanding” of black lives.)
The other set pieces come from Marie, and show that Zendaya is a remarkable actor. In the first she stuns Malcolm into rare silence with a lacerating assessment of who he really is. In the second, she explains to him why not saying thank you is “symbiotic of our relationship”.
This is a stunning film with tour-de-force (another phrase Malcolm hates) performances. It is about two people who share a life off-screen, and what happens when one of them decides to put the other’s life on screen. “Once you know someone loves you,’’ Marie says, “You never think about them again.’’
Journey beyond the end of the world
Wealthy people promise technology to empower mankind, but it is the real and broken people in Jennifer Mills’s new novel who aim to save the world.
‘What a weird way to start a show. What were we thinking?’
As they prepare to drop the needle on their ninth album, the chart-topping Adelaide trio reflects on strength, vulnerability and how they never expected to be rapping into their 40s.
I Care a Lot
Amazon Prime
★★★★