Marla Grayson is a #Girlboss
“My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year.” These three sentences are our entrance into Kazuo Ishiguro’s sixth novel, Never Let Me Go. Despite their studied banality – in classic Ishiguro style – they contain the seeds of the eeriness of the novel. The elision between institutional and personal in “caring,” the oxymoron that is “professional love,” mirrors Ishiguro’s principal themes – placid narration used as a mask, documenting where the professional invades the personal and inhuman the human.
It is no mistake that Kathy, a woman, is our narrator: caring work is “women’s work.” The horror of films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is in part the subversion of the role of caregiver by women. Their evilness is not just that they are cruel; it is that they are cruel women.
Netflix’s new thriller I Care A Lot, directed by J Blakeson and starring Rosamund Pike as the scammer Marla Grayson and Peter Dinklage as Russian mob boss Roman Lunyov, begins by disrupting that same balance between love and profession. Marla, with the help of corrupt doctors and shady care facility employees, claims legal guardianship over elderly people perfectly capable of caring for themselves, moving them into care homes and selling their assets for profit.
We open in court, where a man alleges that Marla has kidnapped his mother and is denying him access to her – Marla responds that he has failed to take care of his mother. She wins, and he follows her to the street: “I hope you get raped, I hope you get murdered, and I hope you get killed,” he screams, inches from her face. “Does it sting more because I’m a woman? That you got beaten by someone with a vagina?” she replies. “Having a penis does not automatically make you more scary to me – just the opposite.”
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I Care A Lot never resolves its ambivalence towards Marla or to this scene. Does Marla’s ruthless pursuit of wealth and refusal to be intimidated by men make her a feminist hero, a #girlboss, or does she cloak exploitation and greed behind pseudo-feminist platitudes (also like a #girlboss)? Its desire to express that ambivalence is ill-suited to its genre choice, however. When Marla scams Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest, who can’t quite seem to figure out what her character is meant to do), who turns out to be the mother of Roman Lunyov, they struggle for control over her and the diamonds Marla finds in her safety-deposit box.
Each attempts to kill the other, somehow unsuccessfully each time – you’d expect the Russian mob to be more effective than this! – until Lunyov proposes they go into business together instead, expanding Marla’s scam nationwide. The set-up ensures that neither side is worth rooting for, nor are their exploits clever enough to be entertaining on their own. The revenge plot relies on the feeling of justice served, but that is inimical to the ambivalence Blakeson wants to convey.
This failure is reflected in the reviews of I Care A Lot. Outlets targeting older demographics leaned towards viewing it as an indictment of late capitalism. InStyle declared that “Rosamund Pike is the Super Hot Villain We Deserve” while Bitch Media proclaimed “There’s therapy to be found in these films, where the lesson is not so much that ‘fear gets you beat,’ as Marla warns, but that it feels good to be a bitch, and take what you want sometimes. After all, men have been doing it for centuries.”
Pike plays Marla as a cross between her breakout role as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl – affectless, omniscient, imperturbable – and #Girlboss author Sophia Amuruso – colorful, camera-ready, spouting feminist ideals while dogged by accusations of discrimination and abuse. She captures perfectly how Marla is able to weaponize her femininity in the sexist setting of caring towards those in positions of power (like the judge who assigns her guardianships) and capitalist-aligned feminist ideals to justify her scams.
Where the revenge plot that occupies the middle of the movie is a unique combination of frustrating and banal, the end shows how I Care A Lot might have been better. After going into business with Roman, Marla has expanded her business into a nationwide caring empire. As she walks out of a cable news interview, the man from the beginning emerges from the parking lot and shoots her. Did he kill her because of her exploitation of his mother, or because he couldn’t handle being “beaten by someone with a vagina”?
Blakeson wants to suggest both how women are oppressed under capitalism while also sometimes being the oppressors. He wants to capture the complex intersectionality of wealth and gender, and perhaps how Marla’s uses of performative femininity are racialized. But these themes appear in I Care A Lot only as subtext, constantly suppressed by the needs of the tired revenge plot. Perhaps a lesson from Ishiguro’s placid prose could have helped.
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