I Care a Lot Analysis

 I Care a Lot (2020)

Written and Directed by: J Blakeson
Starring: Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage
Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical.

Rosamund Pike is terrific. There are some Gone Girl psychopathic vibes here too. It's such a pleasure looking at such grey women characters - because women are generally complex and films make them so simplistic that it almost feels like a missed opportunity. Although here, I felt the complexity in Marla's character was not coming through so well. On paper, Marla is hungry for money and success - and she is ready to do anything to go there, which reminded me of American Psycho (both are psychopaths, just at different degrees and that here she wouldn't directly kill people). There is a tone that they achieve in the performance, and they stick to that. There is a lot happening with Marla physically, she gets beaten up, she falls, she puts herself together back again and she becomes successful - but internally, I felt that she's the same except for some maturation that happens with everyone over time.

The film screams out structure at every beat. We see a solid setup in the opening 10 minutes where we get an idea about what the film is, we see inciting incident at the 15th minute, the villain getting stronger in Act 2 and the "all is lost" moment at the end of Act 2. The film has a moralistic ending, like a classic gangster movie plot - where a character goes from rags to riches in the wrong way and in the end - gets killed. This wasn't much of a problem for me, except for the predictability - I didn't see the ending coming but then all the beat points felt like we've seen such beat points before. Them getting beaten up, them taking themselves together back again. This film also reminded me a lot of Aaron's Sorkin's Molly's Game, although that film showed the character arc in a better way - about how Molly got tougher by the ending.