Rosamund Pike As Marla Grayson on ‘I Care a Lot’

There's a class of smile, that wide, gleaming, shit-stirring grin that says: I hate you. And also: I'm going to kill you. Can we call it the Pike? After Rosamund, obviously, who serves it better than most anyone working in movies right now, and who has the added asset of a voice that adds a layer of superb threat to that smile — a contralto murmur that can make any line, regardless of how nonsensical or excessively explanatory, feel magnetically, appealingly dangerous. That voice and smile were the pith of Gone Girl — to which Rosamund Pike's new film, I Care a Lot (presently streaming on Netflix), is somewhat indebted. It's the stuff that made the "Cool Girl" talk leap off the page and into our minds, the stuff that gave Pike the range to play two individuals almost on the double: both the genuinely jilted wife and the woman who didn't want to be a fucking wife in the first place. Heroine and antiheroine: if anyone can negate the difference, collapsing them into one, it's Pike. 

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And that smile. It's no big surprise that one of the first things Marla Grayson (Pike) does after getting a tooth taken strange, in I Care A Lot, is take a trip to the dentist. Of course, her life is in imminent danger. Her ongoing scam — a tangled and troublingly plausible plan in which Marla turns into the legal guardian of semi-or barely-incapacitated old marks in request to seize their assets — has been uncovered, because, it ends up, she's played with some unacceptable old lady, one Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest). Above all: fix that Fortune 500 Fuck You grin. For without that — without the facade of above-broad professionalism, which is really a cover for her professional immorality — who might she be? 

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This isn't a question that I Care a Lot strives to answer — to its great credit. J Blakeson's film has its flaws, dawdles and drawls when it'd be in an ideal situation rocketing along, keeping the energy up, ricocheting from incident to incident with an abandon befitting its heroine. Be that as it may, a thing it gets almost-right is a curious vacuum of information about its Scammer in Chief. What we know: That she's excellent at this, a bit of an old genius who has all the right connections to both nursing home staff and a sympathetic appointed authority (played by Isiah Whitlock Jr.) willing — knowingly or not — to grant her guardian status over the unsuspecting. We realize she has a partner in crime, who's also her partner in life, named Fran (a refreshing Eiza González). We realize she has Pike's classic homicide bounce — that she's an influential woman, merciless if she has to be, and maybe regardless of whether she doesn't have to be. 

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In any case, when I Care a Lot gets moving, it appears Marla has landed herself a bad target, a woman she believes to have no family ties (along these lines nobody to come looking for her) who, in fact, has ties, namely to a quietly raging Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage). And then we're off. It's a world inhabited by a fantastic cast (balanced by Macon Blair, Damian Young, Alicia Witt, and Chris Messina, and others), a solid bit of intrigue, and a lot of ground to cover. An excessive amount of ground, maybe, for the film to go as high as can be as its potential proposes. 

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A case in point: Though the scam in itself is dastardly and notable, what demonstrates generally notable about Blakeson's endeavors are the one-on-one standoffs between Pike her and bitter enemies, namely those played by Wiest, Dinklage, and a sharp-suited yet apparently innocuous Messina. What's memorable are the nearby ups: on that Pike (we're trademarking the smile; it has been decided), on Dinklage's cool and curious rage, on Messina's bright-looked at shark, on Wiest when she serves lines like, "Have at it, you container of cunt." (Wiest, an all-time great, obviously savors the alliteration there.) 

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It's the point at which the movie tries to get us to see the "point" that it flails a little, however not because the point does not merit making. In fact, what sails highest by the film's end are the ideas we find in action, rather than through explanation. The ideas about how Marla became the woman she is, about the inner wellspring of all that vindictive fire of hers, which, again, are not excessively explained (besides by a sometimes-cloying voiceover that even Pike can't make convincing). If just the movie had been whittled down a little to heighten the razor's edge at its middle. 

I Care a Lot definitely has a political critique on its mind, a melody to the tune of something-something-Late Capitalism, which the biting sarcasm of the movie's swift succession of late scenes confirms yet doesn't quite nail. There is indeed a great, witheringly sharp movie buried in I Care A Lot. In any case, it gets a little lost in all the goings-on. The energy of its best scenes and performances isn't matched by the movie itself, which invests an excessive amount of time with its eye trained somewhere else, on complex however unexciting bits of exposition which, rather than adding clarity, just serve to disrupt the general flow. The movie fails in its third act — at that point swings back around to an act of violence which, had the movie really lived up to its promise to that point, might have demonstrated to be the firearms blazing (literally) Fuck you that Marla Grayson otherwise handsomely addresses and also, importantly, betrays. See the movie for the performances and the idea — and watch it intently for the potential it contains, yet doesn't entirely exploit.