‘TRUST’ FUN
Stellar cast pays dividends in Getty kidnapping drama
‘Trust” doesn’t bother to hide the fact that it is cribbing from “King Lear.”
As you probably recall from middle school, that Shakespearean classic tracks a monarch who tests his offspring’s love for him and ends up losing everything he holds dear.
Season one of the new FX series from Academy Award-winner Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire”) depicts the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III (Harris Dickinson) and the disdainful reaction from his grandfather, billionaire oil tycoon J. Paul Getty Sr. (Donald Sutherland, “Ice,” “The Hunger Games”), probably then the richest man in the world.
Getty Sr. is the sort of man who is irked when he learns his daily newspaper is going up a tuppence.
Living in his gloomy estate, he taunts the various family members still at home with questions about their devotion to him.
“Trust” at times seems about as factually accurate as the “B.C.” comic strip, and Boyle’s visual affectations and his over-reliance on split-screens do not always serve the story well. (He directed the first three episodes.)
The show comes with a weighty disclaimer that the story was “inspired” by actual events and that some dialogue was invented for this story.
Unlike the recent bigscreen flop “All the Money in the World” with Mark Wahlberg, “Trust” alleges young Getty initially planned the kidnapping (and then suffered as it got out of hand) — something he and the family denied for decades.
Whatever “Trust’s” hold on the facts, it more than makes up for in its performances.
Sutherland delivers career-defining work as the billionaire whose soul seems to have dried up and blown away. About the only emotion he allows himself is utter contempt for the family he considers useless. When a servant points out the news of his grandson’s kidnapping in the newspaper, Getty carps about the butter.
By the end of the third episode, Hilary Swank is finally given enough material to explain her presence here. Her turn as the teenager’s divorced, impoverished mother, Gail, grows in stature as her son’s plight turns all too real. Gail is the only one who seems to have a beating heart — and the will to fight for a trapped child.
Brendan Fraser, best known for starring in the blockbuster “Mummy” series, makes a welcome comeback as Getty Sr.’s fixer and head of security James Fletcher Chace.
Chace heads to Italy with a suitcase of money and manages to draw the attention of local crime bosses, but not in the manner he had hoped. Fraser plays the Texan as a canny impersonation of Larry Hagman’s J.R. Ewing with a splash of Columbo.
Raising a forkful of spaghetti hanging limply, he comments, “Obvious design flaw here.”
Whenever any network gets the idea to make another reboot of “Dallas” — and one will, bank on it — Fraser here makes the best case for the starring role.
Addressing the camera, Chace wonders: When you have everything you could possibly ever want, what do you value?
“Trust” finds faith in a dark answer.