WAD A All The Money In The World
Screen legend Plummer manages
LAST month, Christopher Plummer saved a dour Charles Dickens biopic with a few brief but lively scenes as Scrooge.
Now he’s topped his turn in The Man Who Invented Christmas with an effortlessly brilliant performance as the world’s second most-famous miser – the oil magnate JP Getty.
Six weeks before Ridley Scott’s film about the 1973 kidnapping of the billionaire’s imaginatively named grandson John Paul Getty III was due out, a string of lurid stories came out about the alleged sexual misdeeds of Kevin Spacey, the actor playing him. Unflustered, Scott, 80, approached the studio with an astonishing plan. For an estimated $10million he could reshoot Spacey’s scenes in just nine days, with Christopher Plummer taking over the role.
We’ll never know how good the film would have been with Spacey, although the old man make-up he sported in the early trailer did bring to mind Leigh Francis’ sketch show Bo’ Selecta!
As, presumably, comedy wasn’t the effect Scott had in mind, perhaps it isn’t too surprising he was so keen to start again.
It was an expensive gamble but it has paid off handsomely. Plummer, 88, is the best thing in the film.
In this tense, tightly-plotted thriller, his chilling Getty – not just the richest man in the world but “the richest man in the history of the world” – has an almost pathological obsession with penny-pinching.
Visitors to his Surrey mansion are confronted with a functioning payphone in the lobby, he washes his own smalls to save on hotel room service and when his favourite grandson “Paul” is kidnapped in Italy he tells visiting reporters precisely how much ransom he is willing to pay.
“Nothing,” he says with the faintest hint of a smirk. Unsurprisingly, the