I Care A Lot Girlboss

In the twenty-teens, the “Girlboss” earned a share of popular culture. Pantsuits, self-help manifestos and “lean in” feminism coalesced around the ideal of a woman who found success through traditional avenues—think: Sheryl Sandburg—and looked damn good doing it.

, a new Netflix dark comedy-thriller, seeks to skewer this trope. In the film, which was written and directed by J Blakeson, the autour takes aim at the dark underbelly of the Girlboss with a tale of an antihero who weaponizes feminist language to whitewash her greed—until it comes back to bite her.

The film centers on Marla Gray (Rosamund Pike, once again proving her mastery for bringing depth to the despicable), a woman in the business of exploiting the elderly. In an all-too-realistic sequence, we see her process of bribing a doctor to misdiagnose perfectly healthy elderly folk, convincing a judge to deem them incapable of making decisions for themselves, and usurping control over their assets and lives.

I Care A Lot: A Dark Twist On #girlboss

It’s a good grift, until she picks on the wrong little old lady. Marla meets her match when a seemingly feeble target, Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), turns out to have powerful ties to the Russian mafia, who have no qualms about playing as dirty as she does. Enter Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage) as the operation’s patriarch and a truly terrifying adversary. What follows is a plot that takes the Girlboss to her logical conclusion, replete with mayhem, murder and little moral ambiguity.

The film starts with something of a mission statement. “There’s two types of people in this world: the people who take… and those getting took, ” Marla explains in the opening voiceover as we see her elderly victim withering alone in their court-mandated nursing home. This woman is her latest victim, who we are introduced to through her son begging for the right to see his mother. After the judge rules in Marla’s favor, the son accosts her on the street and spits in her face.

Minutes into the film, Marla yells back at the son of her latest victim, “Does it sting more because I’m a woman? That you got so soundly beaten in there by someone with a vagina?”

I Care A Lot Leans Out Of Girl Boss Trope

At face value, these lines seem like a gross appropriation of feminism, the screenwriter’s attempt to justify Marla’s behavior as the product of a sexist society. But this is a misreading of the moment, which is not a thesis of the film but rather a thesis of Marla’s character: a woman who herself may take or leave feminist values, depending on whether they serve her self-interest. A Girlboss.

Is more film noir than morality play. Sure, the script concerns itself with the institutional elder abuse, but the film is more interested in the woman behind the scheme. It’s replete with dark humor and high-adrenaline thriller sequences, and it’s delightful to watch Marla elude justice.

Marla takes on a cockroach-like invincibility, protected by her total lack of regard for doing the “right thing, ” and her absolute refusal to lose so much as a tooth (literally—when a tooth gets knocked out in an accident, Marla schleps it around in a jug of milk until she can get to a dentist). It’s delightful to watch, but it’s hardly ambiguous: Marla is a Bad Guy.

I Care A Lot Movie Review Wlw Film Reviews

Questioning the Girlboss can sometimes read as reactionary, as a vestigial, knee-jerk discomfort with women in power. At best, critiques point out that immorality is gender-neutral. At worst, attacks simply regurgitate the biases that have kept women disempowered for millennia—that women who dare to seek power are inherently greedy, selfish and bossy. But what happens when the Girlboss is in the wrong? Who do we root for then?

Asks. J Blakeson imbues our protagonist with no redeeming qualities (unless you count killer hair). You’d have to be a sociopath to root for our ruthless protagonist, but you’d have to be heartless to root for her opponent, too. That the Girlboss joins forces with the bad guys sheds light on the dark side of a culture that valorizes achievement without any consideration of whether those structures are worth succeeding in anyway.

In the final scene, after completing a fawning TV interview, Marla finally receives her punishment. On her way to her flashy sports car, Marla is accosted by the son of one of her victims—the man from earlier, who she rebuked with her Girl Power speech. The man who threatened to rape and murder her. After all her success, the man is back for revenge. He shoots her, and as she bleeds through her pristine power suit, he gets in the final word: “Fucking bitch.”

I Care A Lot” Is Delightfully Nasty

Isn’t a perfect film. There are plenty of plot holes—most notably, that a seasoned mafia boss who can fake his own death nonetheless has cronies incapable of executing a straightforward murder. The huge vape is weird, the second act drags on, and it’s a real shame that it seemingly slipped Blakeson’s mind to imbue Marla’s girlfriend, Fran (Eiza González), with a single discernible personality trait.

Is a searing and thoughtful indictment of the Girlboss, and it is correct to point out the trouble with a woman who is so wrapped up in her self-empowerment narrative that she fails to consider—much less “care a lot” about—the people she hurts. The film covers new ground, and it’s exciting that a normie Netflix film can feature a same-sex couple without making it

Their queerness. That Blakeson can depict a lesbian sociopath without it being seen as a statement on lesbian people at large is emblematic of the improved and diversified media representation of lesbians in recent years.

I Care A Lot (2020)

And just as it is a sign of progress that there is room in the mainstream for flawed gay characters, it is a sign of progress that

Feels comfortable enough to criticize one of the most widespread iterations of modern feminism. It is a sign of progress that marginalized people can be judged not on their identity, but on their character.

And it is a sign of progress that audiences are ready to hate Marla not for being a woman, or for loving another woman, but for the depravity at her core. It’s equal-opportunity evil. Just what our foremothers dreamed of.“I Care A Lot” is a stinging indictment of neoliberal “girlboss” feminism Rosamund Pike’s character Marla Grayson justifies her exploitative con as a crusade against men

I Care A Lot Review: Rosamund Pike Is Deliciously Devious

In an early scene in Netflix's I Care A Lot, Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike), a professional legal guardian, sits behind her desk while mafia lawyer Dean Ericson (Chris Messina) not-so-subtly threatens her. Messina's character wears three-piece suits and looks culled from the pages of GQ, albeit with a couple day's too much stubble for a male model. He oozes masculinity. 

Marla does not want him there. By conniving with a doctor, Marla has just been handed the guardianship of a woman named Jennifer, whom she sent to a retirement home (without her consent) when she took control of all of Jennifer's assets. Dean presents himself to Marla as Jennifer's lawyer, and insists that there has been a mistake regarding Jennifer's debilitated status. 

Marla lies to Dean, and tells him that Jennifer's condition suddenly deteriorated two weeks ago. That's simply not true, Ms. Grayson, Dean exhorts. You know it, I know it. If the doctor wrote a note, he knows it too. 

Girlboss Review: The Arguments Against And In Defence Of Netflix's New Show

This bitter riposte is at the heart of Marla's worldview: men, as she says, are out to defeat her. Fittingly, her coworkers — or henchwomen — are almost entirely women, as is the doctor that she works with to subjugate unwitting seniors.

The asterisk to Marla's feminist ethos is that this large cabal of girl power is doing tremendously evil things. The doctor helps Marla find innocent seniors and legally kidnap them through the courts, stripping them of control of their assets so that Marla can profit as their guardian. Indeed, those who try to get in her way often are men — frequently lawyers and family members of the conned seniors. But her men-versus-women worldview is a severe misapprehension. 

Marla epitomizes the modern ideal of a girlboss: the lady entrepreneur whose success is defined in opposition to the masculine business world in which she swims upstream. The term, often written with a hashtag, became popular around 2014 with the publication of the eponymous book by Sophia Amoruso, the founder of retailer Nasty Gal. In a retrospective on the neologism published in The Atlantic, Amanda Mull described the philosophy of #girlboss-ism as a kind of convenient incrementalism. Writes Mull: Instead of dismantling the power men had long wielded in America, career women could simply take it for themselves at the office.  She continues: Like Sheryl Sandberg's self-help hit 'Lean In' before it, '#Girlboss' argued that the professional success of ambitious young women was a two-birds-one-stone type of activism: Their pursuit of power could be rebranded as a righteous quest for equality, and the success of female executives and entrepreneurs would lift up the women below them. 

Hollywood's Empty Weaponized White Feminism Of 'i Care A Lot' And 'promising Young Woman'

That describes Marla to a T: convinced that her relentless conning of seniors is some type of righteous quest for equality. Yet unlike the platonic ideal of a girlboss, Marla's

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