Film Marcus Berkmann
ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD (15)
You have to hand it to Ridley Scott. Eighty years old, still directing a film a year, regards Christmas and holidays as a waste of time. So, when the star of his latest film, Kevin Spacey, became as toxic as an arsenic and strychnine compound with added polonium-210, he sacked him, hired Christopher Plummer instead, and reshot all his scenes in just over a week at a cost of $10 million. The film came out on time seven weeks later — just before the waste of time that was Christmas, in fact. ‘It was a business decision,’ he told the Guardian, looking stern and bearded.
And if any one film is going to remind you that cinema is primarily a business, it’s All The Money In The World. This is the story of the kidnap of John Paul Getty III in 1973, a favourite era for filmmakers at the moment, as it lets them put everyone in ridiculous bell-bottom trousers and mad floral shirts. Kevin Spacey did play 81-year-old Paul Getty in an absolute heap of prosthetics. Plummer, now 88 himself, doesn’t need any of that. Michelle Williams is old Getty’s daughter-in-law and young Getty’s mother, Abigail. And Mark Wahlberg is the investigator, wearing a suit with lapels so wide you keep expecting him to fly away.
Plummer, we should say straight away, is brilliant. I’ve never really bought him as the kindly old grandpa he often plays in films these days, but as the skinflint and general bastard Getty he has a curious, lizard-like quality, to the extent that, if he told you that he had an extra pair of eyelids, you wouldn’t be at all surprised. Michelle Williams, so utterly wasted in that silly film about PT Barnum, brings warmth and sharp intelligence to a difficult, multi-faceted role. And Wahlberg is Wahlberg, as always, looking slightly confused when required to do anything more than stand there like a plank. Possibly the most interesting character, though, is Cinquanta, one of the kidnappers who gets close to the young Getty, and stops his evil masters from killing him. Like all the kidnappers, Cinquanta rarely shaves, and sweats much more than the rich folks. But did he exist? Indeed, did any of this actually happen?
For Ridley Scott has made many films, and we now know how he operates. As befits a man who cut his teeth in advertising, Scott favours the visual over the verbal: he is drawn to an arresting image as a moth to a flame. So the old story that Getty was so mean he had a payphone for guests is repeated here, but Scott has had him put the payphone in an old-fashioned, red telephone box in his main hall. Do we believe this? Of course not. The film ends with a daft car-chase through the Italian countryside, which definitely didn’t happen.
When Scott has a really good script, such as The Martian or Blade Runner, he can make a great film. When he has a lousy script, the film generally stinks to high heaven, which makes you wonder whether he knows the difference. This is somewhere in between. At one point, Plummer says he called his book How To Be Rich, although the publishers preferred How To Get Rich. Any fool can get rich, he says. It’s being rich that’s hard. But Scott is so keen on his visuals that, in this film, being rich looks wonderful. The camera lingers over long driveways, huge gardens and massive houses. My entire flat would fit into his front room. I’d have a bit of that, given the chance.