Film reviews: I Care A Lot

Rosamund Pike as Martha in I Care A Lot PIC: Seacia Pavao / Netflix

Rosamund Pike channels her inner Gone Girl in I Care a Lot (15) ****, an American-set, none-more-black comedy thriller about a court-appointed professional guardian for the infirm who exploits her position to mercilessly rip off her elderly wards. Pike plays Marla Grayson, a self-styled “lioness” all too willing to game the system and do whatever it takes to get ahead with no regard for the collateral damage she might leave in her wake. With a professional manner that’s as unflappable as her bob-cut is severe, Marla has the family court judge wrapped around her finger, the local care home in her pocket and a doctor all-too-ready to supply her with a steady stream of marks in return for kickbacks and stock options.

That Marla is utterly reprehensible is the point, and it’s a testament to Pike’s performance that she doesn’t try to make her in any way sympathetic. Indeed, her repellent nature is supposed to make us cheer when it turns out her latest cash-cow client, Jennifer (Dianne Wiest), has some pretty nasty associates of her own who don’t take kindly to her suddenly being made a ward of the state. But that’s also what’s great about British writer/director J Blakeson’s fiendishly inventive script, which has some roots in reality, but is mostly content to operate in the heightened realm of something like To Die For, Gus Van Sant’s brilliant mid-1990s comedy starring Nicole Kidman as a woman with a similarly ruthless mission to become a success. As the stakes start escalating and a true nemesis emerges in the form of Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage, Blakeson’s film forces us to question why we find one type of murderous movie monster acceptable and not another. Yet what’s also fascinating about this is the way the film’s twists encourage us to swap our allegiances for characters who are all rotten to the core. Indeed, right up until the final scene it plays like an entertaining, appropriately demented send-up of the cutthroat, bend-the-rules, use-money-as-a-weapon, do-whatever-you-want gangster mentality of corporate America.

Unfortunately, Blakeson proceeds to dull the film's impact with a seen-it-all-before finale lifted wholesale from a British gangster movie that I won’t name here because it would constitute too much of a spoiler for what is otherwise a supremely entertaining film. Still, it’s a shame. As much as the final scene makes narrative sense by offering a violently twisted reassurance that all debts have to be paid eventually, it undermines the film’s hitherto acute ability to satirise the starker reality of the current moment where the opposite seems to be true for those at the top of the economic food chain. Despite this lapse, I Care a Lot is a gleefully mordant romp, with a savagely funny performance from Pike at its centre.

Bill & Ted star-turned-documentary-maker Alex Winter’s latest film Zappa (15) **** is an engrossing deep-dive into the music and life of Frank Zappa, the maverick rock star, experimental composer and unlikely political figurehead who died from pancreatic cancer in 1993 and whose career here feels like the only rational response to the creeping conservatism he was witnessing all around him.

Kicking off with his final gig playing to thousands of culture-starved rock fans in the newly liberated Czechoslovakia in 1989, the six-years-in-the-making film rewinds to give us a kind of cradle-to-the-grave portrait of Zappa that functions both as a useful primer and as a more expressionistic immersion into the mindset of an artist driven by a singular desire to get what he heard in his head out into the world in a format that satisfied him.

The latter was his personal definition of success, and while he had a certain amount of commercial success too, he was a compulsive workaholic who generated an incredible amount of material that forced him to become an inveterate archiver of his own life and music. As a result, Winter has been able to draw from a vast treasure trove of never-before-seen material in order to submerge us in Zappa’s life. But he also shifts the focus away from Zappa’s status as an absurdist rock iconoclast in order to present perhaps a fuller picture of him as an avant-garde composer who used the guise of rock ’n’ roll to advance a more radical artistic agenda not limited by the drug-fuelled excesses of his counterculture contemporaries.

Indeed it’s useful to be reminded here that Zappa didn’t use drugs, seeing them as more of a distraction from the insidious machinations of society at large that his own youthful brushes with the law had opened his eyes to. This was something that would fuel his lifelong anti-authoritarianism, and while he could be as much of rock ’n’ roll cliché as anyone, the film finds clever ways to subtly reconcile the seeming contradictions of his radicalism and his pragmatism and show how his relentless pursuit of artistic independence blossomed in his final years into a political role as a free-speech advocate and, more bizarrely, the cultural ambassador for the newly emergent Czech Republic. In short Zappa the man lived quite the life and Zappa the film does a fine job of exploring it.

I Care A Lot is available on digital demand from 19 February; Zappa is available on digital demand now from www.altitude.film

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Film reviews: I Care A Lot | Zappa