Queer Villain Spotlight: Marla Grayson ("I Care A Lot")
Rosamund Pike's lesbian grifter is a study in riveting, captivating, and utterly capitalist queer villainy.
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Warning: Spoilers for the film follow!
I’ve been a huge fan of Rosamund Pike for a while now, thanks in large part to her brilliant acting work on Amazon Prime’s The Wheel of Time, in which she plays the Aes Sedai Moiraine, a powerful woman who has made it her life’s work to find and protect the being known as the Dragon, the one person in Creation who can defeat the Dark One in the Last Battle. It’s a role that showcases all of Pike’s strengths as a performer, particularly her almost uncanny ability to convey steely, icy strength and ramrod composure. These traits are also very much in evidence in the J Blakeson’s stylish neo-noir I Care A Lot, in which she portrays Marla Grayson, a woman who has made a career out of consigning elderly people to care homes and then plundering their wealth.
From the very beginning, Marla makes no apologies for who she is. In fact, the film opens with her voiceover, which informs us that, since the rules are made by those in power to keep everyone else in line, she sees no problem in manipulating them to achieve her own ends. She’s a cutthroat crook–willing to sacrifice elderly people on the altar of her own ambition–and she makes no apologies for this. Indeed she seems to revel in this chance to reveal to the audience how much she enjoys taking advantage of a system that has been designed to keep the exploited in their place. Never mind that in doing so she has become the very thing that she seems to condemn.
Nevertheless, there’s something refreshing about this opening monologue, and about the film in general, in that it doesn’t ask us to sympathize with or even particularly even like Marla. Rather than, say, explaining her criminal behavior by giving her some sort of traumatic backstory or vexing interiority, it instead asks us to take her just as she is: as something of a sociopath. It’s to Pike’s tremendous credit that she gives us a character who is so absolutely captivating to watch that we find ourselves cheering for her, despite the fact that what she is doing is unequivocally evil. There’s a steely grace to how she holds herself that keeps you spellbound: it’s there in the way she crisply delivers her lines; it’s there in the much-commented-upon bob; and it’s there in the way she holds her vape.
It’s also there in the way that she engages with anyone who crosses her path. Marla is someone who relishes having control, and she won’t relinquish it without a fight. This is true even once her most recent scam goes wrong, when it turns out that she’s bamboozled the mother of a powerful Russian mobster (played by Dianne Wiest and Peter Dinklage, respectively, both of whom are excellent). Not even the threats from a high-powered lawyer are enough to shake her faith in herself and in her right to take advantage of others for her own benefit.
Seen in this light, the fact that Marla is also unapologetically queer makes her all that much more fascinating. In fact, it becomes clear throughout the film that her girlfriend Fran is the one person in the world with whom she shares something approaching an emotional bond and, while there are a couple of moments when we see them engaged in physical intimacy, far more convincing are those little instances where they share a glance as they are perfecting their heist. They’re joined together by their villainy, and there’s something intensely fascinating and pleasurable about watching them perpetrate yet another crime.
In some ways, Marla is the very embodiment of late capitalism. From her point of view, people aren’t people so much as they are resources to be exploited, a fact made visually clear when we see the photos of her various victims mounted on the wall of her office. Of course, she doesn’t get it all her own way, particularly once Dinklage’s Roman decides that she must be punished for daring to have his mother committed against her will. Yet not even his efforts to have her drowned in her own car are enough to keep this superwoman down, and the plot takes some truly spectacular turns as Marla manages to not only escape but flip the script on Roman, ultimately gaining custody over him.
Some critics have taken the film to task for the way that its narrative doesn’t always stand up to close scrutiny, but for me this is one of the queer pleasures that it offers. Like Marla, the film follows its own rules, and if they don’t always match up to the logics of the real world–or even its own internal consistency–it's so stylish and slick and smart that you find yourself not caring. When, toward the end, Roman offers Marla the chance to expand her operations nationwide, it’s hard not to celebrate her victory, even as we also know that it’s reprehensible and that this is going to allow her to exploit and imprison even more elderly people.
Which brings us, of course, to the end, when Marla–now riding high on her newfound success and living a life of pampered luxury with Fran–is confronted by an outraged Mr. Feldstrom, whose mother she had managed to commit at the film’s beginning. As he did in his first appearance, he wields his patriarchal authority (he loves calling her “bitch,” among other epithets), and he then shoots her in the chest, after which she bleeds out as Fran desperately tries to save her. Understandably, many critics have seen this as a yet another iteration of the pernicious and surprisingly enduring “bury your gays” trope, but I think this is a too-easy interpretation of that’s going on. After all, did anyone really think that Marla was going to survive, given all of the terrible things that she’s done?
More to the point, the way that this entire incident is framed–with the twistedly feminist Marla on one side and the brutish, MAGA-esque Feldstromon the other–exposes the moral contradictions and morass of our current age. Like all queer villains, Marla ultimately raises more questions and challenges then she can ever fully resolve, and therein lies her potent appeal and deadly charm.