I Care a lot: I don't care enough to care about this film because no one gets their comeuppance.
Where: Amazon Prime When: 2020
Score: 2/5 Watch again: No
When did I watch: March 2020 Language: English
I'm not going to say a lot about this film because there is not a lot say. It creates a lot of emotion in people because of the awful treatment of the elderly by this woman.
The plot revolves around a woman, Marla Grayson, who gets paid to be the legal guardian of older people who the court deems can no longer look after themselves. In court, she claims to 'really care' about these people she looks after, and the judge willing gives her the guardianship of these people. In the next scene, we see that she is looking after almost a hundred people and considers them as money generators. She prays on the rich without families, so she can put them into old people's homes, sell their houses and assets and pay herself for the work. When she can't find a person in genuine need of care, she gets a doctor to testify that the older person can no longer live by themselves. She does this to an elderly woman, who appears to have her own family and then takes away her phone, and when she starts to complain, Marla Grayson gets the doctors at the care home to drug her. But it turns out this old lady does have family, and he is a mob boss. I'll leave the rest for you to watch the film or if you've seen it, I don't have to explain.
But I have some issues with this film, my main one being that I don't care emotionally about any of these characters. Marla is an awful human being, so when the mob tries and kill her, I don't care, same with her girlfriend, Fran. Roman is a mob boss and orders his people to break into a care home and kill the people who work there to save his mum, so again when he almost dies at the end, I don't care. And Mrs Peterson, the women we are meant to care the most about, the woman taken from her home and drugged, I can't bring myself to care about her. Why? Because she is colluding with the mob as she has blood diamonds, she is used to launder money, and she is not surprised when a man shows up and kills nurses in front of her and seems happy about it.
Also, who was the hero meant to be Marla, the entrepreneurial businesswomen who owned her sexuality, or Roman, the careering son who saved his mother from abuse? Because they are both evil. Why do they team up at the end? Roman should steal her idea and do the guardianship con himself; he shouldn't be willing to partners up with a woman who abused his mother. It makes no sense.
Also, Marla Grayson's character is trying to be a complex woman but failing. Why is she vaping all the time? Vaping tells us nothing about the character except she is addicted to nicotine and is trying to stop smoking. Quitting smoking is an admirable thing, so what does it say about this character? She's gay but not in a 'she is gay', but in a femme fatale, she is sexually deviant for sleeping with her employee and then taking advantage of all these old people kind of way. Also, because we never see her being awful to another elderly person other than Mrs Peterson, who is not entirely innocent, we don't know how bad Marla is. We see her manipulating the judge into stopping a man from seeing his mother, and we see her being callus when a person dies. Still, we don't point-blank see Marla Grayson abusing anyone other than Mrs Peterson. My dad couldn't finish this film because of how Mrs Peterson was treated, but I didn't sympathise with her as much as I felt I was expected to.
My issue is that the elderly do get abused, and as the population ages and the business around taking care of old booms, this will become more and more common, a film on this topic is needed and relevant. But this film doesn't check the boxes of a film about the abuse of the elderly. The bad guys don't get their comeuppance, yes Marla Grayson gets shot at the assassinated at the end by the son of a woman she abused. Still, it so half heated after she built an empire on exploitation.
I know this was a bit ranty rather than critical, but I felt this could have been a fantastic film but just got confused about what it wanted to be.
