Christopher Plummer perfect as Getty
Plummer is solid and Williams shines in Getty family saga. Chris Knight reviews the film.
ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD ★ ★ ★ ★ out of 5
Cast: Michelle Williams, Christopher Plummer, Mark Wahlberg
Director: Ridley Scott
Duration: 2 h 12 m I honestly can’t think of a better actor to portray Jean Paul Getty than Christopher Plummer. At 88 he’s the right age to play an octogenarian billionaire. He can be serious to the point of scariness, but he’s also able to modify his emotional reactions on what seems to be a molecular level. He can deliver a look that tells you he’s not joking, and he doesn’t find anything particularly funny, but he’s aware there are such things as jokes, and that one of them might even be on him.
Plummer famously stepped into Ridley Scott’s new film, All the Money in the World, for some 11th-hour reshoots, after Kevin Spacey was dropped because of allegations of sexual assault. The drama of that they-said-itcouldn’t-be-done fix will forever hang over the movie, but the new scenes don’t look out of place, and the film succeeds on its own merits. I’ll say no more about that.
The story is based on a true one, although the details seem to have been ripped not from the headlines but from some ancient Greek tragedy. In 1973, oil baron Getty was the richest man in the world, although he famously denied knowing his worth. “If you can count your money, you’re not a billionaire,” he tells a reporter in the film. He’s also a notorious cheapskate.
But he’s asked to count some of his fortune when his grandson, Paul (Charlie Plummer, no relation to Christopher), is kidnapped in Italy. The bandits want $17 million. His grandfather says no.
The elder Getty gives several reasons. He notes that paying the ransom would invite the kidnapping of his 13 other grandkids. He remarks that he prefers to spend his money on things, because things are what they are; they never change, or disappoint, the way people do. (Exhibit A: The middle Getty, Paul’s father and Jean Paul’s son, who had become a drug addict and was divorced by Paul’s mother, Gail.)
We also sense fear in Jean Paul. When the OPEC crisis causes oil prices to spike, making him even richer, his immediate concern is that now he has more to lose than ever. And so while his reasons make logical and even fiscal sense, they add up to emotional lunacy. Eventually, Jean Paul tells his head of security and chief fixer Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg) to bargain for the kid’s release, “as quickly and as inexpensively as possible.” Which is not unlike the task Scott faced when — but I said I wouldn’t talk about that.
On the other side of the emotional ledger is Gail, played by Michelle Williams. “Steely resolve” doesn’t even begin to describe this performance. As the boy’s mother and an outsider who married into money, she could portray her character as hysterical, or as barely holding hysteria at bay. Instead, she moves beyond it.
There’s one scene where, frustrated at Fletcher’s inability to bring Paul home, she hauls off and clocks him with a phone. It draws blood, and an audible gasp from moviegoers. Wahlberg has been in The Fighter, two Transformers movies and Ted 2, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him take a hit like that. Williams may well be a late-season addition to the Oscar favourites.
Charlie Plummer remains a bit of a cypher as the kidnap victim, though to be fair he has much less to work with than the other actors. One could imagine a version of this story where we didn’t see him at all, though that would rob of us Romain Duris’s performance as Cinquanta, the most sympathetic of the bad guys, who comes down with a case of Lima syndrome. (It’s like Stockholm syndrome, but where the kidnapper starts to pity the captive.)
I’m no more than wiki-proficient in the details of the actual kidnapping, but David Scarpa’s screenplay, adapted from John Pearson’s book Painfully Rich (since retitled to mesh with the movie), takes at least a few liberties with the timing of things, not least the manner in which the drama ended. And Jean Paul’s “Rosebud” moment may strike some as contrived.
But Scott seems more interested in the complex interplay of wealth and family and psychology than in note-by-note historical accuracy. An interesting and not insignificant sideline has to do with the custody of Paul — not between the kidnappers and the family, but between the Gettys and Paul’s mother. Neither all the time, nor money, nor wisdom in the world can ever fully sort out this kind of disagreement — which is what makes it such as endlessly fascinating source of storytelling.