I Care A Lot and Heist Movie Morality

Over the weekend, I watched the Netflix movie I Care a Lot. It's a movie about a corrupt lawyer who uses the legal guardianship system to rob elderly people. One of my friends posted about how they thought the movie was awful. I think it's an example of "heist movie morals."

First, let's get something out of the way. Although Rosamund Pike, the lead actress, won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical, it's not funny and definitely not a musical. However, I found it a fascinating bit of nastiness.

So, in a heist movie, we have a group of crooks who are trying to steal something from a well-protected place. The crooks may be sympathetic or not, but they are, in the end, crooks, doing bad things. Yet we the audience are rooting for them, largely because the point of the story is to see if they can pull it off.

In this movie, Pike's character runs afoul of a mobster played by Peter Dinklage. The movie is told mostly through the POV of Pike, so we're nominally rooting for her. What we're rooting for is to see if she can pull off the heist - to see if she's a good enough crook. What makes it interesting is that she's a creature of the courtroom and the boardroom, not the mean criminal streets. We're not supposed to like her, and I for one did not.

In fact, we're supposed to like the Dinklage character. He may be a crook, but he's the one who's been wronged. I think we're also supposed to see Pike's fatal flaw, which is she underestimates her opponents. She's repeatedly given warnings which she ignores. (Her girlfriend is the voice of reason in these matters.)

I don't want to spoil the movie, but the final scene fits exactly within the character created by Pike. (Any spoilers I'll save for the comments.)