It's hard to make us care about the three female villains at the center of the two recent black comedies I Care A Lot and Me You Madness, the first two of which are the respective main characters, the third of which is Louise Linton, the writer-director-star of the latter, who happens to be the wife of thankfully-now-former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and a onetime guest of Fort Knox who notoriously scoffed at critics who suggested that her photo op--next to a sheet of money that could have paid a full salary for a laid-off hospitality worker during the pandemic--was a tad out of touch. Linton was an actor before her foray into Marie Antoinettedom, and will no doubt be one again now, but by grace, will never write or direct again.
Both comedies revolve around steely blonde girlbosses who do horrible things with glee, but only I Care A Lot is a gleeful experience to watch. There's a movie somewhere in Me You Madness, a self-aware American Psycho parody about a hedge fund manager/serial killer who unexpectedly finds love in her latest conquest, but Linton isn't the director to make it happen. It's not only that she stumbles as a filmmaker--although she does--but her proud identity as a real-life Cruella de Vil lends too much sobriety to what's supposed to be a bitterly funny satire.
Catherine Black (Linton) does stonks by day, and by night seduces and murders unsuspecting men in her sanitized Malibu dream house. But when she strikes up a rapport with her latest mark, Tyler (Ed Westwick), she grudgingly decides to spare him. And then he steals her car.
It's a decent idea for a comedy, and Linton and Westwick sometimes have an easy chemistry in their banter that's fun to watch, and would certainly be more fun were it not for the real-life sins of both actors threatening to creep in (Westwick has several credible sexual assault allegations against him). There are bright moments: I admit I enjoyed a back-and-forth in which Tyler holds a white sofa hostage with a glass of red wine, and an extended fight sequence which involves a curling iron, thankfully not in the way you expect.
But Linton's idea of black comedy has a pretty high floor. Perhaps her marriage into the Family Values administration makes her reluctant to go too far. I'm probably not spoiling much in revealing that Catherine has a penchant only for murdering bad people--what a cop-out!--and that her idea of "partying" involves a setting on her phone that makes her house play Taylor Dayne. At least Hannibal Lecter was into creepy stuff, like opera. The confounding ending is so maudlin that it feels like it was tacked on by Jerry Falwell (before the throuple scandal). I kept watching through the credits, thinking Linton was saving something snarky for the last minute. Nope: just a reminder that she, like a lot of the Trump ilk, is a conservative traditionalist wearing the temporary skin of a provocateur. Doesn't take much to bring her from knife-wielding badass to smiling handmaid.
I Care A Lot, meanwhile, is the bizarro version of this story that I expected when I started Me You Madness: a thriller about a sociopath just as cruel as either Catherine or Louise, which doubles down on her cruelty and doesn't hedge. Writer-director J Blakeson takes a huge risk asking us to follow a main character based on audacity alone, because Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike) isn't merely cruel; she's irredeemable. But the risk pays off because Blakeson's screenplay is clever and Pike's embodiment of the character is fascinating to see.
Because Blakeson doesn't try to make us like Marla, but rather entices us with her cleverness and brazenness, we remain with her all the way. Marla is a "state-appointed guardian" who, with the help of a corrupt doctor (Alicia Witt), gets herself assigned as conservator for well-to-do elderly women, commits them to a nursing home, and sells their assets for profit. Pike's portrayal of complete remorselessness, accented by the frequent casual power-puff on a vape pen, actually anchors the film: we want to see her comeuppance, and at the same time we want to see how far she'll get.
Marla eventually digs her claws into Jennifer (Dianne Wiest), an early-stage Alzheimer's sufferer who seems too good a mark to be true, because she is. I won't say why, but Marla soon finds herself the target of a mob boss (Peter Dinklage) who is as ruthless as she is.
Where I Care A Lot could have been an average potboiler and gotten away with being merely diverting, Blakeson's writing elevates it to art. Take the scene where Marla first discovers that the mob is after her. An average movie puts her immediately in the victim role, while this one instigates the plot with a scene between Marla and a mob lawyer (Chris Messina) that is one of the funniest I've seen in a thriller since North by Northwest. Messina, who is absolutely flawless at playing a sleazeball, offers to buy her out; her response, and his response to her response, are the confirmation of this movie's greatness.
The final climax and conclusion are disappointing only because the setup has been so gripping. We expect an explosion, and we only really get a spark, which is still fine. And Blakeson doesn't cop out like Linton does, in that he gives Marla the coda she's earned.
Me You Madness: * 1/2 out of ****
I Care A Lot: *** 1/2 out of ****
I Care A Lot is available on Netflix. Me You Madness is available in hell's car wash discount bin.
