Film: I Care a Lot

Year: 2020 

Director: J Blakeson 

Starring: Rosamund Pike, Dianne Wiest, Peter Dinklage and Eiza Gonzalez 

Language: English 

Content warning: discussion of elder abuse

I Care a Lot is a dark comedy and dramatic telling of a fiercely ambitious court-appointed guardian, Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike). Through bribing doctors and wooing judges, Grayson all but kidnaps elderly wards and takes their assets for herself, in morally dubious yet legal ways. Hoping to climb to the top and make millions, she seizes an opportunity to take on a new ward, Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest). All seems well until Grayson discovers a dirty secret about her new ward that threatens to take everything, even her own life, away from her.  

Directed by J Blakeson and available on Prime Video, this film left very little to the imagination in its dramatic and exceedingly violent look at legal guardianship in the United States. It leaves the viewer to wonder if stories like this occur in reality, or if this is really just a fictional twist on a system that exists to support the elderly who can no longer take care of themselves.  

This question led me down a rabbit trail looking at cases that have been documented on the (lack of) transparency of these court-appointed guardianships. I discovered that this abuse has been going on for decades, as highlighted in several articles from The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Forbes. This is also not the first time that a popular streaming service has addressed the issue. In their docu-series, Dirty Money, Netflix aired an episode called “Guardians, Inc.”, which hoped to uncover the truth about stories of twisted guardianship. The common theme in all these retellings, fictional or not, is accountability. Who is supposed to be holding these guardians accountable? And if the answer is the law, then why is it failing to do so? 

Stories like the fictional one portrayed in I Care a Lot evoke anger and disappointment. How can a system whose core intention is to support those who cannot care for themselves, be so frequently, and dare I say easily, manipulated? Regardless of the answers to the questions posed here, Blakeson’s film is a captivating 120 minutes that will have you on the edge of your seat and leave you wondering if there truly is “no such thing as good people”.