ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD

R, 132 minutes. Now playing at Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. What’s the going rate for a Spacey-ectomy? Ten million dollars isn’t all the money in the world, but it’s a lot. And it’s the amount director Ridley Scott’s backers paid to remove Kevin Spacey from an already completed version of the brisk, medium-good kidnapping drama “All the Money in the World.” In a breathless few weeks since multiple accusations of sexual misconduct against Spacey began surfacing in October, Scott and company recast the role of oil magnate J. Paul Getty with Christopher Plummer; reshot his scenes; re-edited the full package; and pushed the Dec. 22 release date back by three days, to Christmas. Behind the scenes as well as on screen, “All the Money in the World” is the true story of a celebrity’s sudden disappearance. In 1973, 16-year-old John Paul Getty III, the grandson (known as Paul) of the richest man in human history at the time, was walking along the Piazza Farnese in Rome when a van full of Calabrian kidnappers grabbed him and sped off. The Mafia extortionists holding the teenager captive initially set the ransom at $17 million. But Paul’s mother, Abigail (Gail) Harris, didn’t have it. And when she approached her exfather-in-law J. Paul, he declined. “I couldn’t be weighed down mentally with a family,” the elder Getty says earlier in the film, explaining his now-and-then attachments to alleged loved ones. For five months, Paul was relocated and ultimately squirreled away in the mountainous countryside, while the kidnappers kept lowering their demands, and Gail performed various feats of familial negotiation and brinksmanship to get her son back, minus one ear. The story here is really Gail’s story, more so than Paul’s or J. Paul’s. The excellent Michelle Williams makes her an intriguing, cagey insider/outsider within this realm of the super-rich. So how’s Plummer? He’s very good. He’s 30 years older than Spacey, so the makeup and visual slight-of-hand now works in the opposite direction. Judging from the original trailer, with Spacey, the 1973 scenes caked the actor in old-age prosthetics. Now, in the Plummer edition, the elder Getty requires little makeup, and when the film flashes back to 1948, it’s a simple matter of Plummer’s hair and eyebrows acquiring a dark tint. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune