I’ve watched the film twice now. First time, I watched it alone, late at night, after my family’d gone to bed. I’d figured out from its trailer that this was probably going to be one of those movies that my wife would not enjoy. It’s never fun to watch a film for the first time with someone who’s providing an unsolicited, running commentary that highlights every little thing about the movie that irritates or pisses them off.
On my initial viewing of I Care A Lot, I thought the film was terrific, a well-made, stylish, intelligent, darkly humorous Thriller concerning itself with a subject of which I knew very little (guardianship). The acting was fantastic, the writing was (mostly) clever, the direction was sharp and confident, and the story moved along at a perfect pace.
There were some missteps towards the end of the film, but, overall, I found it a very satisfying experience. The film’s ending made sense from a storytelling perspective and it didn’t leave me frustrated. I was never bored, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for the majority of contemporary motion pictures I’ve sat through for the past five or six years.
I wanted to revisit the film before I posted about it, so I sat down last night to watch it again, this time with my wife.
On second viewing, those late-story missteps had me wishing the writer-director had considered wrapping things up a bit differently. I’m not sure how, I just thought some of the plot turns seemed a bit silly, which lessened the film’s impact. I also felt they were really overdoing it with their efforts to generate sympathy for the main character late in the story. If you’re going to take your main character down that dark path of Evil, Mean, Wicked & Nasty, then stick to it. Remain bold and go all in.
Overall, I still find myself recommending the film…but only to viewers who appreciate caustic, dark-humored (mean-spirited, some might say) Thrillers. This is not the kind of movie that’s going to appeal to mainstream tastes.
My wife hated it. And she’s not alone.
Man, do a lot of people hate this movie. And I do mean HATE.
I didn’t read anything about I Care A Lot until after I’d seen the movie. If you decide to read anything at all substantial about a movie before you’ve seen it, you can’t really complain about someone else spoiling it for you. Just watch the movie, or as much of it as you can tolerate, then read about it. Simple.
Scrolling through this movie’s user reviews on IMDb, I was taken aback by the sheer volume of One-Star/”worst movie I’ve ever seen” posts. I quit scrolling those reviews somewhere, I’m guessing, around the #200 mark. The reviews were mostly brief, very repetitive, and written poorly– misspellings, lack of capitalization/punctuation, run-on sentences, etc.
This is the sort of writing I would have wasted precious time correcting on my students’ papers when I was a Rhetoric & Composition tutor 27 years ago.
These bad reviews appeared to have been written by those who:
-felt suckered by Netflix into believing they were about to watch a Comedy (which this is not; it’s Satire, that sub-genre of Comedy once described by a cynic as “what closes on Saturday night”, i.e. fails at the box office, because such fare often appeals only to niche audiences, not to mainstream tastes).
-believe they can only approve of a film if the main character is one they find “likeable”, “sympathetic”, “relatable”, i.e. somebody they can “root for”. Many of the negative reviewers seemed so emotionally overwhelmed by the film that they were unable to express their sentiments in coherent, grammatically-correct sentences.
-were offended because of the film’s “ideology”. These folks either felt the film was pushing a pro-feminist/LGBTQ agenda and were enraged by it, believing that the main character was glorified and intended to be a superhero the audience was meant to ‘root for’…or, on the flip side of the ideological coin, that the film was smearing the feminist/LGBTQ population as a whole by depicting such a character as a sadistic sociopath.
As a viewer, I don’t require main characters to be “likeable”, “sympathetic”, “relatable”, i.e. somebody I can “root for”. They simply have to be doing/saying interesting things. That’s what makes a character compelling for me. When I cease to find their onscreen behavior interesting, the movie’s lost me. I never found I Care A Lot to be uninteresting.
When I sit down to watch a movie about any kind of criminal activity, I don’t expect to see sympathetic/likeable characters. Even in crime dramas with conventional conflict dynamics of Good Guys Versus Bad Guys, the Good Guys don’t have to be all good, nor do the Bad Guys have to be totally bad.
To Live And Die In L.A. has been my top favorite Crime Drama since I first watched it in a theater twice in one week back in November of 1985.
Among the three central characters in that film, there’s not a single one who’s not corrupt in some way or without significant flaws that lead them into varying degrees of criminality. To this day, the film continues to fascinate and thrill me, but I also understand why some people just can’t get on board with it. Almost every character in the film’s morally or ethically tainted. Nobody to “root for”.
It isn’t as if I Care A Lot is the first film to come along to feature a compelling sociopath as its lead character. A Clockwork Orange immediately springs to mind. The character of Rupert Pupkin in The King Of Comedy could fall into that category, also.
I wouldn’t imagine many of the folks trashing I Care A Lot on the grounds of its alleged embrace of immorality would be the kind of viewer to place Kubrick’s controversial film or Scorsese’s 1982 cult classic in their Top 100 favorite films, but I certainly am.
John Schlesinger’s 1985 true-life dramatic thriller The Falcon And The Snowman also features a pair of lead characters whom mainstream viewers have a hard time sticking with. My dad, for example, who paid to see the film in a theater, walked out hating it. Why? Its treasonous, felonious lead characters (“The name of that movie should’ve been The Traitor And The Drug Dealer”, he once told me) who spent the film making one horrible/dumb decision after another.
But that’s what the movie’s about, I countered. You knew that walking in, since it was based on a real life spy case. Did you really expect to like these two characters? They’re shown on the movie’s poster as prisoners, in hand- and leg-irons and belly chains, flanked by federal agents. My own expectations for The Falcon And The Snowman were different, so when I finally sat down to watch the movie, I found it fascinating and well worth my time.
On moral grounds, I disagreed with the behavior and decisions the title characters made, but…that’s what the movie’s about. If it had seemed as if Schlesinger were trying to convince me to sympathize with these characters or approve of what they did, which I don’t believe the film does, I might have had a problem with it. In my view, the story’s presented in a style that’s very matter-of-fact. The viewer’s allowed to bring their own judgment to it.
The Devils…Get Carter…The Friends Of Eddie Coyle…Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia…King Of New York…Reservoir Dogs…All favorites of mine, all featuring corrupt, shady, criminal, and/or immoral central characters that viewers with more mainstream tastes would very likely have a hard time “rooting for”, much less “identifying with”. As a viewer, I’ve been drawn to that kind of material since I was a teenager. Not that I’ve ever looked to those types of films as potential lessons/examples of how I’d want to live my life. To me, they’re just movies. No more, no less.
It’s always refreshing to see filmmakers painting their characters in shades of gray as opposed to black and white. To me, that indicates the filmmakers prefer that audiences make of the characters what they will (which audiences do, anyway, regardless of filmmakers’ intentions), instead of heavy-handedly painting their characters in stark, unmistakable broad strokes of Heroism and Villainy in an attempt to steer the audience in one direction or another.
It’s also refreshing to see characters in a film who go against the grain of mainstream or politically-correct expectations, i.e. conventional wisdom and stereotypical characterizations. There’s nothing daring about pandering to the broadest possible audience demographic by smoothing down all the rough, perhaps unsavory edges of a character or playing it safe by not offending the political sensibilities of this group or that group.
In life, there’s no such thing as a perfect human being. Unlike some viewers, apparently, I don’t expect to see characters like that when I sit down to watch a certain kind of movie. When I do, I get restless, because I can only suspend my disbelief when I’ve forgotten that I’m watching a movie.
Perfect characters behaving exactly as anticipated are boring. It’s transparently formulaic to me. When I’ve become so restless with a film’s lack of surprises, creativity, energy, or its approach to the material, that I begin checking a movie’s running time, its makers have failed.
But, it’s not the end of the world, after all. It’s only a movie. One movie in a streaming sea of thousands. The choice to shut one off or sit through it, for better or worse, is always yours.
Those “two hours” of one’s life that they’ll “never get back” isn’t the movie’s fault. It’s the viewer’s.
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