I Care a Lot Confronts Girlbosses on Their Own Terms
An amoral businesswoman is bad, sure, but more importantly: she's wrong
“There's two types of people in this world: the people who take and those getting took. Predators and prey. Lions and lambs. My name is Marla Grayson, and I'm not a lamb. I am a fucking lioness,” intones Rosamund Pike at the start of I Care a Lot. It's the sort of mantra familiar in a strain of modern feminist both affectionately and derisively referred to as a “girlboss.” To its proponents, it's a way for women to directly confront the misogyny often faced in the business world and claim spaces for themselves in a way that is unapologetically feminine. To its critics, all it does is allow the ruthlessly ambitious to put a progressive sheen on engaging in capitalism's worst excesses. I Care a Lot unquestionably takes the latter side of the debate, but it does something more interesting than just that. It engages proponents on their own terms, offering an argument pitched directly to their sensibilities: it simply isn't going to work.
I Care a Lot is a movie about Marla Grayson, a professional guardian who gets appointed by courts to manage the affairs of those deemed incapable of caring for themselves. It very quickly becomes apparent that, rather than the compassionate advocate she paints herself as to the court, in reality she's a parasite preying on the vulnerable, shoving healthy seniors into draconian nursing homes so she can bilk them for all they're worth. She often justifies this in the terms quoted above, emphasizing the ways the world is set against women. “Does it sting more because I'm a woman?” she says to the son of one of her victims after he threatens her. “You can't convince a woman to do what you want, you call her a bitch and threaten to kill her,” she says later to her girlfriend, dismissing another threat of violence.
The movie doesn't dismiss this point of view out of hand. Marla genuinely does face provocations and insults over the course of events rooted in her gender. The son of her victim that threatens her does so with misogynistic verve, frequently calling her a bitch and hoping for her to get raped. When a high-powered lawyer seeks to dissuade her from holding onto another of her victims, he does so with casual disrespect, belittling her position and expressing sardonic disdain that her accomplices are also women. But the movie doesn't accept that as an excuse for the amorality of her actions either. It's clear she has nothing but contempt for those whose lives she ruins, and early on we see in excruciating detail the horror of having your very life and freedom taken away from you at the behest of a corrupt doctor and the charismatic grifter who can play a judge like a fiddle.
Yet the movie doesn't expect presenting the harms that selfish ambition in the guise of feminist reclamation can cause to be persuasive to its adherents. When the aforementioned lawyer, listing the reasons she should release his client, says “One, it is the right thing to do, but I doubt that means anything to you,” he could be speaking directly to those tempted to sympathize with Marla. So rather than lingering long on the depravity of her actions, here it shifts focus to a different tack. Marla can lie and cheat and bribe and cajole her way into success against men who don't respect her, but that's still playing the game by their rules. And as far as capitalist patriarchy is concerned, the rules only apply as long as they're winning.
You see, that lawyer represents the movie's other main pillar, Peter Dinklage as Russian mobster Roman Lunyoff, and one of Marla's victims happens to be his mother. Lunyoff is the embodiment of the patriarchy Marla rails against. Where she must claw her way to respect, he commands servile fear through stony silence alone. She is composed, calculated, in-control; he is barely contained rage, nearly flying off the handle at every misstep and misfortune. While she is successful, she's hardly wealthy, scratching out just a comfortable little corner for herself. He's amassed an untold fortune with a finger in every unsavory pie. And while she may be ruthless and amoral, he has little compunction descending into depths she's scarcely dreamed of.
Mostly dismissive at first, Lunyoff is content to set a lawyer on her and handle the situation quietly. But once Marla shows resistance rather than the deference he feels she should, the situation quickly spirals. Extortion, fraud, kidnapping, and murder enter the equation, escalating with each blow Marla manages to turn aside. After her doctor accomplice is killed to make a point, you can see Marla seethe with indignation at this violation of capitalism's rules she has so skillfully manipulated. “You want to beat me? Come at me fair and square,” she snarls, “You get me in a courtroom. You outplay me. You don't bring guns into a care home. You don't murder one of my friends.” She knows that patriarchal capitalism is a rigged game, but she thinks she's earned a place with the riggers. The idea that they'd change the game just to exclude her invalidates her entire self-conception.
When you have so much tied up in this vision, you can't just let it go. So Marla does go blow for blow with Roman. When he gets nasty and vicious and murderous, she matches him with her own brand of calculated cruelty, and springs a trap on him as impressive in its inventiveness as it is shocking in its inhumanity. And here is where Marla and the ethos she represents gets its hope spot. Because, now finally respecting her prowess, Roman offers her what she has always desperately wanted: a chance to join the ranks of those who run the game.
He wants to take her personal cruelty and expand it with the voraciousness of late capitalism, to set up corporations and tax shelters and legions of lawyers to shield all accountability. He wants to take her dozens of victims and turn them into hundreds of thousands all across the country. It's the end stage of anything that tries to fight a form of capitalism by its own rules: co-opted, turned into an engine that profits its masters while immiserating everyone else with callous indifference. The only change is that she gets to be one of those masters, and that's her dream come true.
But again, the movie knows that this argument, that fighting to become a member of the patriarchal elite is only going to perpetuate suffering, isn't going to persuade anyone. So it saves its most essential argument for the final scene. Because in the end, perhaps you can earn the success and respect you crave, in spite of misogynistic backlash, through ruthless depravity matched with soaring ambition. But patriarchy, like capitalism, is a multi-headed hydra, and this route leads Marla to focus on one head while the others slowly surround her. The system that keeps ambitious women from becoming CEOs is the same one that inculcates other insidious forms of misogyny into our culture. It's the same system that tells men that women and people of color and immigrants are stealing the opportunities that belong to them. It's the same system that feeds a man's rage over everything he's lost, puts a gun in his hand, and tells him that a woman is to blame.
You can read the movie's last shot, when the son of one of Marla's victims from the beginning of the movie returns to gun her down, as a Shakespearean irony, a monster taken down by the little guy she overlooked. Certainly it's hard to argue she didn't richly deserve it, having robbed the man of his final moments with his now deceased mother. But Marla has already said she doesn't fear death, and death is not the true punishment for her actions. It's the death of her dream. What bleeds out on the pavement of that parking lot is the idea that she could ever buy immunity from all the ways patriarchy poisons society. She may have muscled her way to the table, shattered the glass ceiling through sheer force of will, but that means nothing to the routine violence engendered by toxic masculinity, to a man with a gun screaming misogynist slurs who feels his grievance is justified.
Ironically, it's an argument that is itself pitched in the language of capitalism. It doesn't ignore the moral question, but that's not really the point. Instead, it speaks the language of self-interest, that the girlboss style of fearless women entrepreneurs ultimately isn't even good for those women themselves. It says that any success found that way only strengthens the very system whose poisonous roots will find some other way to destroy you. It may not get you a bullet in the chest like it did for Marla, but it'll get you all the same. That's the whole reason the system exists in the first place.