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movie review - I Care a Lot

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

This is a movie about an elderly woman whose life is turned upside down when she's forcibly confined in a nursing home by a crooked self-employed agent who has the legal authority to make self-serving financial decisions. However it turns out that the elderly woman's son is a powerful and unstable gangster who loves his mother (in his way).

This is a movie bent on exposing the chaos and corruption of the parasitic retirement industry, so it refrains from making the set-up an all out war between the gangster and the agent. Which is odd, because the first half is exactly that, and it's very well set up.

I think they must have realized that they couldn't waste the agent - the main antagonist - by killing her off, which was the obvious solution for a Russian mafia organization that already understood what she was and what she was doing. If they couldn't kill her, they needed continuity, and the obvious choice there was that she'd be connected to powerful and dangerous allies. But to have the system close ranks around her for some reason is unrealistic because that's not how corrupt semi-legit syndicates work. Trust me on this, I've worked in the financial industry for nearly three decades, there is no confederacy among these people. There certainly wouldn't have been anybody involved who would slither out from under their rock to fight the kind of people who send an armed team into a retirement home to extract one resident.

So I think what happened with this movie was that there was a linear show-down plot that they resisted, so the movie switches tone and direction about 60% of the way through. I won't spell out what happens but they were so intent on the lecture about the evils of the business that they sacrificed a natural story arc. And then they realized they didn't have a story arc that would have resonated with people. So they tacked on a final scene that attempts to correct this problem and give us some kind of satisfaction, but the ending they went with implies that maybe things will change in the industry but given what happens I think this too seems unrealistic.

They blew it, and I could see it all coming from the switch at the 60% mark. It's the 21st Century Hollywood sickness that brought us so many failed story-lines.

Not recommended.