I Care A Lot
“Every fortune ever accumulated started with a leap of faith.”
From the start, you’re aware that Marla Grayson is a bad person. Not someone who does bad things, but an intentionally and methodically bad person. She’s a legal guardian that preys on the old and vulnerable. Once the elderly are court-mandated to be kept under her care, Marla then sells off their assets, helps herself to the profit, shrewdly keeps any concerned family members at bay and stores them in a senior living facility. Hide the lambs, y’all, there’s a lioness on the prowl.
Marla’s operation is finely tuned. She’s referred to her unsuspecting clients by their doctors, who embellish things like dementia and other illnesses that would render the elderly incapable of caring for themselves. This go-round the doc refers Jennifer Peterson; an able-bodied, active and wealthy senior minding her own business. Marla believes she’s found herself an easy score, or “cherry” as she likes to call it. Much like Marla’s moral compass, her belief is dead ass wrong.
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Getting the proper paperwork to completely upend Jennifer Peterson’s life goes smoothly as planned. While this film is a work of fiction, adult guardianship of the elderly is very much real and it’s scary as hell. Imagine yourself in retirement, sipping tea and doing the crosswords then someone you’ve never met coming to your door with a court order telling you you must leave your own home immediately, go someplace you’ve never been before, taking away your means of communication, then calmly sitting down beside you with a big smile on their face and saying all this is for your own good. Horrifying. But that’s exactly what happens to Jennifer.
“But before you take that leap, take a long, hard look at yourself. Know who you are.”
While Jennifer is trying to make sense of just what the hell is going on, Marla is running through her house, bank accounts and safe deposit box like Tomb Raider. In the deposit box, she finds diamonds and realizes this is a bigger score than she initially thought. Meanwhile, a sorta twitchy man visits the house looking for Jennifer, where he’s promptly told that she moved. The man nervously reports this information back to his boss. Where we find that Marla’s score isn’t at all who we think she is. The boss sends a lawyer to reason with Marla, offering to pay her off if she’ll just agree to let Jennifer go. Marla, having balls of steel, ignores his threats and refuses. Perceiving she may have stepped in some shit because she initially thought Jennifer had no family, she visits and asks Jennifer to tell her who she really is. Jennifer keeps her cards close to her chest and warns Marla that she’s messing with the wrong old-timer. Of course, her ass doesn’t listen.
Greed begets evil, and instead of simply relinquishing Ms. Peterson, Marla focuses on trying to find out who the muscle is behind her. After a shootout at Shady Pines (I’ll unabashedly reference Golden Girls every time I get the chance), it’s confirmed that Jennifer has strong ties to the Russian mob. The boss wants his mother back, ASAP. Once the doctor who linked Marla with Jennifer turns up dead, Marla swiftly shuts her business down and plans to make a run for it. Throughout all this, she’s resistant to even the slightest show of common decency. Right down to the minute she’s tied to a chair and given the order to be executed. You would think she’d be begging for her life, but nope, instead she asks for $10 million dollars. Mind you, she still has the stolen diamonds and the boss makes no mention of it; only asking that his mother be returned. Rightfully so, he scoffs and orders her hit. Astonishingly, that evil bitch refuses to die, and — not gonna lie — I kinda respected her for it.
It’s not too often that we get women characters that are unforgivingly ruthless and aren’t seeking to redeem themselves. We never get a backstory on Marla Grayson, all we know is that her end goal is to be powerfully rich and she fearlessly pursues that goal into completion. Unfortunately, ambition does not make one teflon.
Check it out on Netflix.
