BEFORE: Coming out of Mother's Day, Damian Young carries over from "Otherhood". My next holiday target is Memorial Day, and I should get there right on time, as long as the chain holds and there are no surprises, or temptations to add any more films along the way. If I'm going to visit my parents some weekend in late May or early June, I should just check to make sure I have the films for those days on DVD or they're on Netflix or Hulu. A trip like that just takes me away from access to my DVR. We're also planning our first real trip since the pandemic started, to go to Chicago for a couple days in June, but I've already blocked those days out on my schedule, I can take three days off from movies and still hit July 4 on target.
THE PLOT: A crooked legal guardian who drains the savings of her elderly wards meets her match when a woman she tries to swindle turns out to be more than she first appears.
AFTER: Whenever I see a city in a film, naturally I want to know what city that is, so I tend to always check the "filming locations" section on every film's IMDB page - if it's a city where I've been, like San Diego, or New Orleans, or Nashville, for example, of course I keep an eye out for anything familiar. But when a film shot in Boston and the surrounding suburbs, well, that's when I start looking up addresses. Exactly one year ago, I watched "We Don't Belong Here" as my Mother's Day film, and the locations felt so familiar that I just had to check - there was a nature reservation and a lot of large, mansion style houses so it COULD have been shot in my hometown - but it wasn't. I recognized the old Norwood, MA movie theater, though, and that was just one town over from where I grew up. While watching "I Care a Lot" I felt the city skyline was a bit familiar, and sure enough, that was Boston. And they shot out in the suburbs, like Wellesley and Natick and there's a key scene at the Medfield Auto Center, on Route 109 - I know EXACTLY where that is, that's also one town over, and I've got an uncle who lives in Medfield, about five minutes from the house two of the characters hide out in. It's great there are so many web-sites now that get even more specific than the IMDB does, usually with photos from the film side by side with the locations.
So the nursing home seen in this film is really a Conference Center on the campus of Babson College in Boston, and the courthouse scenes were filmed at the Norfolk County court in Dedham (I also know Dedham very well, but thankfully not the courts), some of the office buildings and the steakhouse restaurant are in Wellesley, and the jeweler's store and hospital are in Natick (I had an aunt who lived in Natick for a time). This may not mean much to you, unless you're a Masshole or fellow ex-Masshole, or you've got a particular interest in Boston office buildings in the Seaport District. My Dad's the same way, he can spot Boston buildings and streets right away, which is why I wanted to show my parents "Spenser Confidential" on my last trip to visit, but we didn't get around to it. Next time.
My parents are sort of grappling with the idea of entering some kind of assisted living, both of them are turning 80 this year - they've got their affairs in order to the point where if one or both of them require medical care, they'll be able to make some kind of transition and it's all paid for already. But I'd still probably have to travel up and take care of their house and belongings to some degree, I'm just not sure how much time and effort that's going to involve for me. But that's what made "I Care a Lot" so scary for me, because it depicts a woman who functions as a legal guardian for seniors, and she uses medical diagnoses and the court system to essentially get custody of older people, move them into elder care facilities and then sell off their houses and their valuables, while paying herself a salary on their behalf, despite their intentions to stay in their houses and grow old alone. Kind of like Tom Selleck with that whole reverse-mortgage scam (it's a scam, right?) only way more serious and a lot faster.
Marla doesn't want the old people to die, because then she'd have to stop paying herself from their accounts - but she definitely wants them out of the way, and into a facility where they're medically sedated to some degree, can't access their cell phones or receive visits from family, and don't really have any more legal rights regarding their future care. And maybe you thought nursing homes were depressing already, this makes them seem downright creepy, and this was filmed before the pandemic, even. I'm not sure who exactly we're supposed to root for her, certainly not the lead character, because she can't really even qualify as an anti-hero if we just despise everything she stands for. She reminds me a bit of that blood-test inventor, Elizabeth Holmes, because she seems nice at first, but slowly you realize that you can't believe a single thing she says, and she's really just a predator taking advantage of everyone around her to always come out on top. Also, more is never enough for her.
But one day, she shuffles the wrong woman into a nursing home, and whereas her patients' (marks') relatives usually have no say in what happens to them, Jennifer Peterson missed some kind of monthly meeting, and now a rather small (only very big in importance) shadowy figure starts trying to find out where she is, and what happened to her. He seems to have some very bad men working for him, so he may be the head of some kind of criminal organization, and that spells trouble for Marla. Honestly, I thought this was just going to be about a dishonest woman running a scam, which it is for the first part, but then I wasn't expecting the whole second part, or even the third part, for that matter.
So this became a rather unusual, unpredictable battle of wills, as two nasty people kept raising the stakes to get what they wanted, or perhaps to hold on to that little piece of the world that they thought they controlled. Again, hard to find somebody to champion here, but maybe that's the point - the film mentions that every person is either a sheep or a wolf, perhaps that's a bit too simplistic, but this is what happens when two wolves start fighting over the same territory - it probably won't end well for somebody.
Also starring Rosamund Pike (last seen in "Doom"), Peter Dinklage (last seen in "Death at a Funeral"), Eiza Gonzalez (last seen in "Baby Driver"), Dianne Wiest (last seen in "Darling Companion"), Chris Messina (last seen in "The Giant Mechanical Man"), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (last seen in "Da 5 Bloods"), Macon Blair (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Alicia Witt (last seen in "Cecil B. Demented"), Nicholas Logan (last seen in "Instant Family"), Liz Eng (last seen in "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"), Georgia Lyman, Moira Driscoll, Gary Tanguay (last seen in "Knives Out"), Lizzie Short, Kevin McCormick (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Michael Malvesti (last seen in "Moonrise Kingdom").
RATING: 5 out of 10 safe deposit boxes
No comments:
Post a Comment