Netflix has the It movie of 2021 so far, with Rosamund Pike and Peter Dinklage about the evils of capitalism. I'm sure all the review sites will tell you about how great it is and how much you should watch it based on those facts. It's... okay (Pike and Dinklage certainly deliver funny performances) and you'll probably enjoy it based on how hyped you are for it.
It's unfortunate, because there *is* a lot to say about this movie, that is going to make it into very little coverage. Let's resist going into the depths of the movie, and dance along its surface, both insightful and troubling:
First off, it's best understood as the sequel to 2016's Neon Demon.
Not that they share a director or "universe", but in their themes and how they tell a story. Both make hypnotic use of their prog-synth music to romanticize and exoticize the actions of their Evil hero (not an anti-hero, but someone committed to an Authentic Evil from start to end.) "Care" uses similar neon strobe lighting for the times the characters are the most embodied in their actions, even if they only do it one tenth as much as "Demon."
But the connection is more about their unrelenting theme of "humans as commodities." In Demon it is their transient beauty to be sold, and in Care it is their savings and assets to be cashed in alongside the government's and accountants' need to monetize their long term care. It's not at all hard to imagine Pike's Marla as just Elle Fanning's Jesse twenty years later (what with how she hides from her history but it's clear it was not pleasant.) Having lost her youth, she is determined to sell age.
This is not a theme just in the moralistic sense of "treating humans as objects is bad, mmm'kay" but it is about the felt experience of a human character realizing they are the traded commodity of another for solely their objecthood.
One of the interesting subthemes of Care is that the two eldercaremongers do not at all shy away from how they will one day be the helpless old bodies who are their current victims. They say of one mark "She's my personal hero" and "Even sadistic, immoral assholes get old." (Continuing the body commodification theme, the antagonist is a drug/sex trafficker, who flips idly through the polaroids of his cargo rightly contrasted with the wall of mugshots of the protagonist's wards.)
Here is a good point to note two real problems with I Care A Lot.
One, it is not a realistic portrayal of the long term care and guardianship industries. It's absolutely the case that the for-profit institutions that take care of our elderly when we've forgotten about them are heartless capitalist machines that suck them dry and treat them inhumanly. It's a cruel system. But it is a system. The plotters concocting these schemes (and getting rich from them) do not *meet these bodies in person!* They are not charismatic, sociopathic manipulators. The front line workers they recruit are genuinely committed to their clients, and with their low wages and lower resources, are just as exploited. (The chain of corporations at the end resemble the reality of the situation, than the poignant and horrificly funny scenes in the beginning.)
Tangentially, we should note that there are *no good people in the entire film.* The main character and her partner are obviously sociopaths. But so is the doctor, judge, and nursing home manager who enable them. The victims trying to get freedom and justice are... mafioso who kill casually and take delight in the suffering of their enemies. Even the side characters, like the redneck we see at two points trying to save his mother, has extreme anger issues and can't resist misogynistic language. It's an even bleaker moral landscape than Demon.
Two, both of these movies emphasize the abuse of the female body. There's just not getting around it. The two protagonists are very pretty and cosmopolitan. The victims or good guys of any other film. Instead here we see them receive epithets, get beat up multiple times, and lose their bodily agency, and we get to cheer it on because they are sociopaths hurting old people for money. Except as above, the people responsible for this exploitation of old people aren't pretty fetish objects. They are systemic stockholders and mostly male CEO's. So it's hard not to come away with feeling that the audience's naughty-desires are being red-washed (justifying the porn with ethical excuses of anti-capitalism.)
The connection between that aesthetic and Neon Demon is obvious. At least in Demon the objectification is so constant and in your face that you have to feel embarrassed about it and interrogate your own reactions.)
Anyway this issue relates to what cripples the ending. (spoilers from here on) Seeing Dinklage and Pike put aside their differences for the sake of making money is great. Seeing an inhuman industry be glorified by the media is also great. And the tradition of "cool and callous smoothtalker solves the problem they had their eye on, but gets offed by a random nobody who they stepped on without even thinking about it" is delightful class imagery (see "Layer Cake.") But this particular iteration has the redneck return, call the woman a bitch, and accuse her of causing the death of his mother. It's less "the chaotic underclass will get through even the most thought out protections" and more "his pain justifies his misogyny."
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