There’s a lot of talk in I Care a Lot about winners and losers. The goal of the main character (and her main opponent) is a twisted American Dream, where she exploits nefarious loopholes in American guardianship laws for fun and profit. She sees a system designed to protect the elderly and infirm as a totally legal means of getting ahead, and perverts it into a scoreboard. When roadblocks to a new jackpot (again, the assets of a senior citizen) present themselves, she pushes forward with the cold-blooded strategy of a Moneyball-style sabermetrics whiz.

The issues with guardianship laws are a very real problem, and have been reported on extensively by Rachel Aviv in The New Yorker and in the Netflix series Dirty Money. It’s a rage-inducing situation, whereby certain professional guardians, legally appointed by a judge, have manipulated family court proceedings and even doctors’ affidavits to declare people unsound and gain control of their estates. The guardians sell off property and imprison their wards in care facilities while they’re still capable of taking care of themselves. Logically, it barely seems possible, so maybe it was inevitable that the system would end up as the inspiration for a satire/thriller like I Care a Lot. 

So who are the winners with J Blakeson’s film? On one hand, a cutting satire with actors like Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage and Eiza González helps spread the word about the brokenness of the guardianship system. But I Care a Lot, especially in its final act, ends up muddling who we should be cheering for, and offers only violence as a possible solution to the intractable problem that the screenplay presents. It’s meant as a bitter commentary about the nexus between capitalism, ambition, and the way we treat our elders. But the bitterness is so intense that it lingers after the credits roll, causing you to wonder if the movie accomplished much at all, besides its stylish presentation and strong performances. 

This isn’t to say that all movies need to have happy endings. But the ending of I Care a Lot is bleak enough that it runs counter to the darkly comedic jabs of the story that precedes it. The film is unsure of whether it’s helping to tear down a bad system or standing by and hoping others do it. 

The real-life villainous guardians that Marla (Pike) is modelled after seem to have stumbled into their cons by springing at an opportunity. If that happened with Marla, it’s well in the past; when we meet her, she’s built an entire small agency around identifying marks and methodically taking over their lives. Marla claims not to relish destroying these people, but she gets the same rush from the power dynamic as another Pike character does, from screwing over James Bond in Die Another Day.

Indeed, by choosing to play Marla, Pike is chaining together a series of roles that see her characters take extreme actions to advance their distorted views of feminism. Pike’s work as Amy in Gone Girl polarized audiences - probably more so than I Care a Lot will - as viewers feuded over Amy’s psychology and what it drives her to do. It’s a testament to Pike’s abilities that the steel in her characters is never in question, no matter where they end up.

So this film comes up with a new test for Pike’s determination. It places an immovable object between Marla and the assets of her latest target. Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest) is an unassuming lady in her seventies with a nice house and lots of money in the bank. Most importantly, Jennifer apparently has no family to kick up a stink when Marla sneaks her way into being Jennifer’s guardian. However, Marla soon finds out that Jennifer isn’t who she says she is, and a gangster named Roman Lunyov (Dinklage) is putting up a fight that Marla’s never dealt with before. 

When Roman appears, the natural reaction is to want him to tear Marla apart - we’ve seen how savagely clever she is with her con, and we think she’ll finally get some punishment by underestimating her new mark. But the film makes a point of showing us that Roman is no hero: he exploits young women as drug mules. We also see how Marla, despite never crossing paths with gangsters before, is not afraid of Roman at all. Soon they are evenly matched, escalating their feud over Jennifer to almost cartoonish heights.

So neither our protagonist or antagonist are particularly redeemable, and yet there are hundreds of innocent wards caught in the mix. The message the film settles on is one of an apocalyptic scale: what would happen if the guardianship system was somehow spurred to even worse abuse by organized crime? The film has no answers, short of more chaos.

If you hold up I Care a Lot to other crime movies, where an underdog thief goes after a score held by an established gangster, it’s easier to root for the little gal or guy. The main character is still committing crimes, but you feel better about it, because they’re stealing some precious, but inanimate, materials from a worse person. In J Blakeson’s film, the prize is also money, but it needs to be extracted from human beings in one of the most insidious (and yet legal) methods.

The characters believe this is the price of success, and that ice-in-the-veins ambition is the only way to survive in America. Marla finds a way to live with the cost, much in the way Roman does with his business. The question is which practices you’re willing to tolerate. Yet for all of I Care a Lot’s winning choices, I’m not sure they do anything but make you feel like a loser.

I Care a Lot gets three stars out of four.

Stray thoughts

• Part of me really wants to see Marla’s origin story and what she went through to be able to stare down the Russian mob and not blink.

• Macon Blair is perfectly cast as the suffering adult son of one of Marla’s victims.

• I know guns are everywhere in the United States, but do they even have armed guards in nursing homes?