Don’t say I don’t care about you lot – very spoilery. (My four-star review is here.)
“Even sadistic, immoral assholes get old”, says Marla referring to Jennifer, who clearly has a dodgy past (or present). But sadistic, immoral asshole Marla does not get that chance.
Capitalism does triumph at the end. Marla and Roman Lunyov – his name is a spoiler as initially Marla thinks Lunyov is a different gangster who died in a fire, but he turns out to have faked his own death – eventually end up going into partnership.
After kidnapping Marla, Roman decides to kill her in a way that looks “organic”. She’s knocked out and alcohol is injected into her veins, before she’s put in her car unconscious with a bottle on her knees, and pushed into a lake. She wakes up and manages to escape, her scream of rage as she stumbles onto the shore as much at herself as at her opponent.
She then kidnaps him, and she and Fran set him up to look like a drug overdose on a country road. He’s found unconscious with no ID on him, and when he wakes up in hospital he discovers he’s now a “John Doe” in the system. Marla has had herself declared his guardian, then when he wakes demands $10 million for his freedom.
His response is to suggest that instead they set up a conglomerate guardianship business countrywide, and go legal. Using his money and her knowledge of the sector they can make billions and screw people over without breaking the law.
They do and it works, with Marla on magazines and TV business shows, until one day, emerging from an interview in her pristine white trouser suit into the TV studio carpark, she’s accosted by Mr Feldstrom from the start of the movie.
He tells her his mother has died without him even being able to see her, then shoots Marla in the chest. She dies in Fran’s arms, her blood seeping along the concrete. So at least one sadistic, immoral asshole didn’t get old.
Sadly for Marla, someone else cared a lot too, and took the only option he felt was open to him to make Marla pay, once big business and the law had cut off his access to justice.
(By the way Jennifer is Roman’s mother, though Jennifer Peterson is a fake name stolen from a baby who died in 1949. She is released from the care home at the end, and reunites with her son.)
I Care A Lot is on Netflix in the US and on Amazon Prime in the UK