I CARE A LOT

I loved I CARE A LOT.

Remember watching THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED (2009) and it was a lot better than you thought it was going to be?

CARE is by the same writer / director, J Blakeson.

Blend Nicolas Winding Refn’s DRIVE with the Wachowskis’ BOUND and you’ll be approaching the aesthetics and thriller dynamics of CARE. I mean this description to sound like a lot of fun, because that’s what I CARE A LOT is.

I want it to do well. I want to feel about Blakeson’s next film the way I used to feel about John Dahl movies. I really miss Dahl and that decade-long run of top notch mid-budget thrillers he made, from KILL ME AGAIN in 1989 to JOYRIDE in 2001, via his masterpiece, THE LAST SEDUCTION in 1995. Dahl was a film-maker who understood perfectly how crime thrillers worked, what their roots were, and how much fun they ought to be.

In I CARE A LOT, Rosamund Pike plays a professional guardian angel taking on elderly people who can no longer be trusted to look after themselves. She’s worked up a scam whereby she gets to asset-strip the people she is meant to be protecting. Except, this time, she picks on the wrong person. And so the unstoppable force meets an immovable object.

Pike plays her guardian character with precision, navigating the moral minefield of the plot nimbly. She knows how to do this. Watch her go up against Dianne Wiest (Dianne - where have you been these past thirty years?) and Peter Dinklage (you thought his Miles Finch was brutal, wait until you meet him in this.) The result is thrilling and preposterous. A home run, where you’re not sure who to root for; where your ambivalence towards the characters might be an intrinsic part of the film’s energy.

Adding to the spin is that the film’s satirical elements have been given extra currency by the recent NY Times documentary, FRAMING BRITNEY SPEARS, and its exposure of the potential iniquity of court-sanctioned conservatorship.

I thought CARE was perfect (okay, if forced, I would have had more Wiest in it).

The one thing I didn’t care for was the title. It deserves better. I Care A Lot is an ineffective non-title standing in front of an excellent film.

I CARE A LOT is showing on Amazon Prime and Netflix.