Rosamund Pike clearly relishes the opportunity to play characters with a bit of a nasty streak. Whether it’s earning critical acclaim as the conniving Amy in David Fincher’s “Gone Girl” or as a surgeon on a mission of revenge in the little-seen B-movie “Return to Sender.” Her latest film, “I Care A Lot,” is screening at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival and, once again, finds her going full throttle as an unexpected anti-hero. As to why she chose this specific role, Pike pulls out that delightful smile and replies, “I’ve played a lot of very worthy women lately, and I really kind of need to let that go a bit, I think. I was getting too earnest for my own good.”
READ MORE: “I Care A Lot” unleashes Rosamund Pike in her best role since “Gone Girl” [Review]
Written and directed by J Blakeson (“The Disappearance of Alice Creed”), the Boston-filmed thriller slash black comedy finds Pike playing Marla Grayson, a 39-year-old lawyer who operates a profitable scam that ruins the lives of senior citizens. Working with unscrupulous physicians, Marla uses the court to grant her guardianship over their lives. The unsuspecting seniors are then forced into nursing facilities while Marla sells their assets as payment for her legal fees. When she pulls the stunt on Jennifer Peterson (Diane Wiest), a seemingly wealthy retiree with no known relatives, she soon learns all is not what it seems and that Mrs. Peterson has some deadly friends (Peter Dinklage, among others) who are intent on extracting her from the situation.
Blakeson says the initial idea for the screenplay came from real stories about actual lawyers practicing Marla’s scam. And, scarily, the treatment those “clients” received was worse than what is horrifyingly portrayed in the movie.
READ MORE: Toronto International Film Festival 2020 Preview: 15 Films To Watch
“Some of the stories that you read in these news stories, they’re a bit like Marla but without the charm, really, so it’s even a little bit uglier,” Blakeson says. “[I] couldn’t get that idea out my head of somebody doing that to someone else, and the idea that it tapped into themes of how people’s want for success and wealth sometimes has no bound. There’s a line in the film, ‘What lines are you prepared to cross?’ She’s prepared to cross pretty much any line to get there, including the commodification of other human beings, which is what Marla does.”
Pike, who is currently in the Czech Republic filming the Amazon Prime Video series “The Wheel of Time,” remembered seeing “Alice Creed” and thinking, “Who is this guy who can maintain this totally original tone so deftly through this movie?” She was impressed by how “beguilingly simple” the picture was it almost takes place in one room, but still felt inherently complex.
“Then this script came up, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is written by that guy,'” Pike recalls. “Again, here is this film that will live or die by its tone, and I thought, ‘Well if he’s directing it, he’s probably going to have a really good handle on that.’ Marla was just delicious because she’s shocking, she’s ruthless, she’s fun, she’s awful but she’s amazing, and I was completely sucked in by her.”
Pike continues, “It a seductive read because it’s so bold, it’s so nakedly ambitious. It has this sort of intimacy. You’re getting a window on something you feel you shouldn’t see, it’s a sort of guilty pleasure, and I just thought I would relish sinking my teeth into this character.”
Both director and star live in the United Kingdom and, from their viewpoint, this American-set tale is very much a look at class disparity from the other side of the pond. And, a very timely subject, the idea that you can do almost anything and get away with it to pull off the “American dream.”
“If you look at the richest people in America and the poorest people in America, the thing that we don’t have over here in England is the belief that, no matter how little you have, that you one day will be a billionaire,” Blakeson says. “That’s something that’s fascinating and seductive. It’s what’s so brilliant and so terrible about the system that there’s this thing that you’re always striving for. But, as Marla has found out in a previous life, as she kind of alludes to at the beginning, that she tried the honest way and it was a rigged game. That’s her point of view, so if she can’t beat them, she may as well join them and play the system and tell everybody else to work hard, but she’s going to just work smart, bend the rules and not get caught, basically.”
“I Care A Lot” is an acquisition title looking for distribution in the U.S.
Follow along here for all our coverage of the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival.
