They didn’t need shamed star after all!
A riveting re-shoot that puts Christopher Plummer straight in to Oscar territory
FEW movies get masses of global publicity because of who is not in them rather than who is. But All The Money In The World — a thriller about the 1973 kidnapping of American oil tycoon J. Paul Getty’s grandson — is the film that starred Kevin Spacey until he was engulfed by all those allegations of sexual impropriety.
With shooting completed and the picture only weeks from its release date, director Ridley Scott took the bold, principled, expensive (and let’s face it, from a marketing point of view, rather astute) decision to re-cast Christopher Plummer in the Spacey role, as Getty.
There are many good reasons to see this film, and not least of them is to marvel at the job Plummer did, at the grand age of almost 88. Reportedly, Scott (at 80, no stripling himself) met him as soon as he decided Spacey had become a toxic brand.
Within 24 hours, Plummer had read the script and agreed to do it. His co-stars Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg then declared themselves willing to re-shoot all the scenes they’d done with Spacey — and there are plenty of them. I’m rarely inclined to heap praise on lavishly-remunerated movie folk just for working hard, but this can’t have been easy.
Moreover, Plummer isn’t merely good in the role, but compellingly brilliant.
He is rivetingly creepy, menacing almost, as the ruthlessly acquisitive, incorrigibly miserly, unapologetically misanthropic old mogul holed up on his English country estate, finding in his remarkable art collection ‘a purity in beautiful things that I’ve never been able to find in another human being’.
He is not above buying stolen Renaissance paintings, but he flatly refuses to pay his grandson’s ransom (originally $17million) on the basis that he has 14 grandchildren, and if he coughs up a penny, ‘I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren’.
EVENTUALLY he relents, but only grudgingly and only once he’s worked out how much of his payment can be tax-deductible, when the kidnappers post the boy’s severed ear to a newspaper office.
Anyway, what a slap in the face it will represent for the disgraced Spacey if Plummer now gets a raft of award nominations. But if he does, that won’t be why. Or shouldn’t be why. Even without the extraordinary drama-behind-thedrama, it’s a remarkable and statuette-worthy performance.
Yet it’s not the only one in this film. Williams is luminously excellent, too. I still think she should have won an Oscar for her grieving mother in last year’s Manchester By The Sea.
Here, she draws from the same deep well of emotions as Gail, the mother of the kidnapped boy and ex-wife of Getty’s drug-addled son (Andrew Buchan).
Gail mostly maintains an almost icy poise, but she is still everything Getty is not: a caring parent who is defiantly not in thrall to
money, and therefore, David Scarimplies, infinitely \richer in all the ways that really matter than her former father-in-law whom she barely knows. Like the legend of King Midas, All The Money In The World works as a parable about the shallowness of greed.
The film is predominantly a thriller, however, and a jolly good one. Loosely based on a book about the kidnapping, it begins with 16year-old John Paul Getty (known as Paul, and nicely played by Charlie Plummer, no relation offscreen to his on-screen grandfather) wandering around Rome late at night, confidently bantering with street-corner prostitutes.
Suddenly, he is bundled into the back of a van. It transpires that a Calabrian gang have been following him and the boy’s voiceover explains why.
‘My grandpa wasn’t just the richest man in the world, he was the richest man in the history of the world.’
A series of flashbacks then establish how the family come to be in Rome in the first place, brusquely summoned by Getty who has decided to give his estranged son a job.
In a very good scene they pay an awkward visit to Getty’s swanky hotel room, which is festooned with shirts drying because he refuses to pay for them to be laundered.
THERE is some evidence the mean old man has a heart. Once his grandson has been abducted, he sends his fixer, an ex-CIA operative called Fletcher Chase (Wahlberg), to Italy to find the boy, albeit with the brief that he wants him back ‘as quickly and inexpensively as possible’.
At first, Chase suspects that Paul might have been complicit in his own kidnapping. But gradually it becomes clear that this isn’t the case.
As Chase sees Getty for the grotesque miser he is, he and Gail become an unlikely double-act, with an even unlikelier collaborator, in the form of the most sympathetic of the kidnappers, known as Cinquanta (Romain Duris), who feeds them information.
As the search for Paul begins to reap dividends, the tension escalates. Admittedly, that tension is tempered by the fact that this is a true story with a well-known ending, posing Scott challenges that he doesn’t entirely overcome.
Wahlberg, giving his standard turn as an alpha-male hero, at times seems to have meandered into the wrong movie entirely, as if from some gung-ho police procedural being shot on an adjacent lot. And most of the kidnappers appear to have come from Central Casting — ‘Unshaven Brigands’ department.
But there is so much to admire, and even a few laughs as Scott pokes fun at the Italian police (hapless) and the Italian paparazzi (even more hapless).
It’s a thoroughly enjoyable film, telling an amazing story and blessed with two great acting performances.
If you’re intrepid enough to brave this January weather to go to the pictures, this won’t disappoint.