Ethics Review: I Care A Lot

 

Ethics Review:  I Care A Lot

 

Welcome to my ethical reviews!  These reviews will focus on the underlying messages of a movie, series, book, song or other sort of artwork or entertainment.

I Care A Lot (ICL) is a Netflix movie release, currently on the most-watched list.  It is a comedy that attempts almost no emotional depth, and when it does the effort only makes things worse.  Cringe-worthy cheese across the board. 

Shallow is okay when you are going for easy laughs and slapstick--if there is nothing insufferably offensive.  But the plot of ICL is so vile, so abhorrent, that it practically shoves you into a pit of darkness, even if you are doing your best to tune out and just have fun.  This is the kind of movie that, if analyzed for what it says about us, shows a serious problem.

The protagonist, Marla Grayson, is a predator.  She literally enslaves senior citizens who have worked all their lives to get a home and amass saving.  How?  By having a doctor (who is in on the scheme) declare them mentally unfit and in need of a legal guardian.  Grayson, acting as said guardian, locks the victim away in secure retirement home (whose director is also in on the plot), takes their phone, has them medicated, and proceeds to liquidate their assets for her benefit.

All the while, Grayson pretends to care about the victim, lying straight to their face with a concerned smile.  Hence, the title of the movie. 

Yes, the title is an ode to a gaslighting slaver.

There is zero remorse and lots of scenes of Grayson enjoying time with her attractive girlfriend and generally living it up.  ICL takes seamless effort to make her look cool, sexy, confident and, well, what we all want to be, right!   More than once, to justify her vicious, parasitic lifestyle, she co-opts the ideals of feminism. 

Yes, feminism, which is about liberation and dignity for women, is used in ICL to justify slavery and degrade women. 

At this point, one might hope that the antagonist, the villain, is actually a true hero who will take down Grayson’s evil empire.  Nope.  He is just another predator who kills and enslaves the weak, someone Grayson accidentally crossed by enslaving his mother.  Just to show how horrible this villain is, we are shown, for a few seconds, pictures of women who look beaten, women who are his drug mules. 

Maybe the director thought these two seconds of shockingly brutalized women were necessary, to ensure that we didn’t get the idea that this movie could in any way validate a moral compass higher than slavery.

The rest of the movie is these two monsters battling it out, sprinkled with moments of ghastly violence, mostly against women, such as two black-clad thugs savagely throwing Grayson’s girlfriend to the floor and beating her in the face.  The female redhead doctor who assisted Grayson’s scheme is abducted and murdered.  The other accomplice, the male director of the retirement home, only gets stun gunned.  Poor guy.

Aside from the misogynistic violence, and the smearing of feminism, there is the one black actor in the movie, a clueless judge (described as “stupid”) who always rubberstamps Grayson’s court orders; and there is also, yes, the stereotypical dwarf who we are supposed to laugh at because, well, he is a dwarf in a position of power and authority.  Ha ha.

By the end of the movie, if you are hoping for some comeuppance for Grayson, or her equally loathsome opponent, well, no.  Grayson and her opponent call a truce, join hands, and combine their skills and assets to prey on the innocent.  They are both doing great!

And the moral of the story is …

Someone might try to defend this awful movie as ‘just kidding around’.  That sounds far too much like what people at a Trump rally say about his speeches.  In fact, this movie is basically a paean to someone like Trump.  Zero conscience, lie, worship greed, and prey on the weak.

 

Ethical movie score (ICL):  Abysmal.  No ethical message.  Promotes the worst in people.

(sexism, racism, mockery of dwarfs, praise of predators, praise of avarice, graphic gratuitous violence)

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