SPOILER ALERT 📢
Netflix: Are you serious? You can't be serious with this movie! I knew when this movie laden with oscar winners and nominees was released in February, a month that's considered a graveyard of studio stepchildren, that I was in for some shit. But little did I know that I was actually going to feel harrassed and deeply offended by a movie starring some of my favorite actors! I'm not even done watching this movie and I had to stop and express how much I hate it! Maybe it will all come together in the end, you say? Nope. It done fucked up so badly that there is little hope for them to fix this tone-deaf mess.
If you haven't heard of it. Good. Don't watch it. It will seriously piss you off. You will be pissed off during a pandemic about a movie. I shit you not.
This is what happens. Rosamund Pike subtracts all of the sociopathic satisfaction she aroused in Gone Girl and replaces it with irritating cockiness in her role as Marla Grayson, a con artist who cons old people out of their life savings by convincing a very stupid judge to appoint her as the elder's legal guardian. Her and her network of illegitimate medical and legal consultants proceed to liquidate the victim's assets and bilk them for all their worth until they die. Ew, right? It's not fun to watch someone do something so icky, I don't care how many off-the-rack designer pant suits they wear. Anyway, Marla learns about a "cherry" from her corrupt doctor partner which propels the events of the film. A "cherry" is 1) a term they use to define an elder who is wealthy with no living dependents or relatives and 2) a gross word to use to refer to an old person, or anyone for that matter.
This "cherry" is Jennifer Peterson played by freaking treasure Dianne Wiest. With altered records from the doctor, Marla and her associate Fran easily gain a court order to make Marla Jennifer's legal guardian. They steal her house, sell all of her stuff and remand Jennifer to an assisted living facility. The scene where they take her to the facility, shut her in a room and deny her cell phone usage is so frustrating and rage inducing that you'll seriously want to punch Rosamund Pike in those skeletonal cheek bones. But considering how extremely fucked the situation is, we still wait patiently until some kind of justice is done. Well, 2 hours in, I'm still waiting.
I get it. How can I like Scorsese and not enjoy an anti-hero criminal at the top of their field doing what they do best and getting away with it? Well, that's because Scorsese films follow a satisfying and well executed story arc. This is not what we have here. We do not have a good storyarc. Why? Because this movie is poorly written, poorly acted, badly directed and clearly suffering from some kind of identity crisis. To make it even worse the movie seems to be angling for some kind of female empowerment message which is laughably unfufilled.
The beginning of the movie signals a problematic message and general bull. The film opens with a disheveled man appearing to try to break into a nursing home. The man looks unhinged and we suspect there is something wrong with him. In the court room we learn that Marla is trying to keep the man from seeing his mother, who is one of Marla's charges. Marla with Rosamund Pike's fantastic bob and high fashion looks easily convinces the judge that she is the best possible choice to care for the woman. We would probably be convinced too, but the film employs a running narration of Marla which makes it pretty clear that being good is just something she's not interested in. Actually the narration is kind of fucking irriating too. Marla addresses the audience directly and is all like "you think you're a good person, but you're not. Good is just something normal people do to hide within their weaknesses" or something like that. And you're like, okay, that's annoying af, but you assume its going to connect with something meaninful and intelligent later. I mean, obviously the voice, Marla, is an asshole, but that can't be strictly all she is, right? Well, unload those expectations right now, my friend. Pike's Marla is one dimensional, period. In fact, most of the characters are cartoonish in either their exaggerated ignornance or their exaggerated, unexplained evil.
Marla, who's identifyer is smart, beautiful lesbian and her partner, who can also be identified with 3 words, beautiful tough...Okay, I can't think of anything else actually, get away with the rouse for a good part of the movie until they learn that Jennifer actually has some powerful friends who begin to threaten Marla to get Jennifer out of the facility. But Marla, who is a stone-faced psycho is never once, not ever, bothered by any threat of physical violence to her person and infact will in any and all situations react with nothing but venom laced quips and a stoic cockiness to these threats. And worse, instead of meeting her challenge, all of the dangerous people she meets falter at her every raised eyebrow. I guess they just can't handle her because she's a lioness! (she says this several times throughout the movie. It is never not cringy.) She's a lioness, a winner and she never loses. That is why she can get away with all of the unfiltered evil she's been serving. Why is she this way? How did she get into this business? What problems has she surmounted in her life to give her this upfront confidence? These questions that are never answered or addressed even once.
At one point Marla is tied to a chair in a secluded location in the middle of the night and is threatened by the film's "baddie" Roman played by Peter Dinklage. Roman is apparently high in the leadership of the Russian Mafia and Jennifer is his mother. We really think that this confrontation will drag some vulnerability out of Pike, you know like normal human reactions to this situation, but no, instead we get quips. You want to murder her mother? "Go ahead. I hate that fucking sociopath." That is about all we get of Marla's backstory and it's pretty unfilling information at explains nothing.
Given that Marla is in this situation and is only answering the very reasonable calls to simply release Jennifer with endless jokes and hubris, you expect her to die. Unfortunately, she does not. That is Roman's intention, but even though she is put in a pretty much guaranteed die situation, she manages to survive. As irritating as that is, the actual scene is fucking infuriating. Marla is made unconscious, put in a running vehicle with a bottle of vodka between her legs then sent off a cliff. The scene is almost a shot for shot remake of a similar scene in the 1992 melodrama "Death Becomes Her." All it was missing was Bruce Willis and Goldie Hawn kissing triumphantly behind the car as it careens towards the edge. Why would this movie, which is trying to be a smart, biopic thriller, sample a scene from a famous trash comedy? This is a prime example of this movie's entirely confusing tone. Peter Dinklage does angry, violent boss guy so over the top in some scenes that you're not thinking of Tyrion Lannister, you're thinking about the character Dinklage played in the movie Elf. That's how little range he exhibits here. Continuing with this cartoony, Tim Burton movie merged with a scorsese film we have Danny from The Mindy Project who isJennifer and Roman's legal represenative. His acting is OK in this, but the fact that he literally dresses like Colonel Sanders and is described as "dressing expensive" makes me want to laugh during all of his scenes. Am I supposed to laugh? I dunno. I prefer it to the frustration and rage I feel throughout the rest of the film.
And then we have Dianne Wiest. One of my favorite actresses. She, in this shit cyclone, is the calm center of the film. Her performance in this jumped up Lifetime movie, is good and believable. Her confusion and drugged frustation all appear to be genuine and it's unfortunate that she's in this movie at all or that the director didn't point at her when the other actors asked for guidance. Instead, he told Rosamund Pike to "do Gone Girl without the writing or complexity", Told Peter Dinklage "do Sunny Corleone without the range" and told the writers to "Write the kind of movie where they say the title a lot, unironically."
At the end of the movie she gets shot by the random due who we met in the beginning. It's supposed to make us feel better and drive home an ulitmate morality message. Instead the last minute comeuppance is insulting and the movie is all the worse for it. If you're going to let your herione be this top notch infallible bitch at least drive home the message to the end. Don't water it down with some half-assssed attempt at justice. Fuck this movie.
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