“All the Money in the World” — wherein Christopher Plummer Owns J. Paul Getty
Most of the posters you’ll see for this film feature Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg. Fine, when you’re marketing, you try to appeal to your prospective audience. Williams and Wahlberg and the people they play are mainstream.
Christopher Plummer and J. Paul Getty aren’t. How many octogenarians do you see in the theater?
So, understandable, but too bad, because on the surface this film is about a kidnapping, but deeper down, this film is all about J. Paul Getty.
Not that Williams and Wahlberg don’t give us great performances, they do; but in the same way and for the same reason the story belonged to J. Paul Getty, this film belongs to Christopher Plummer.
A wayward teenager kidnapped by a small group of amateurish miscreants, and held for ransom isn’t international news unless he’s an extremely famous and wealthy man’s grandson. And the extremely famous and wealthy man doesn’t refuse to pay the ransom unless he’s J. Paul Getty.
If it weren’t for J. Paul Getty there wouldn’t be a story, and — as it turns out, if it weren’t for Christopher Plummer there wouldn’t be a movie.
It almost didn’t happen. Plummer, Ridley Scott’s first choice to play Getty, wasn’t available on Scott’s shooting schedule, so instead the plum role went to Kevin Spacey.
And we know how that turned out.
By the time Spacey’s career imploded and he’d become persona non grata on all screens, big and small, Scott had already finished principal photography and much of his editing, leaving him with a tough choice, abandon the film, or reshoot it with a new actor.
Fortunately, TriStar reached deep into its pockets and came up with the necessary cash for reshoots and reedits, and with almost no notice, Christopher Plummer reached deep and came up with J. Paul Getty.
Getty was 83 when he died. Plummer’s 88, and bears a physical resemblance much closer to Getty’s than did the much younger Spacey. Plummer has real signs of age that Spacey’s makeup tried unconvincingly to duplicate.
There’s more. Plummer’s got Getty’s hard eyes and expressions that cycle between happy poker faces and unhappy poker faces, but always poker faces. Getty was a notoriously difficult negotiator, always looking for an opening and never showing his cards.
Plummer moves with an old man’s pained gait, while Spacey moves effortlessly. Older actors know what younger actors have yet to find out — what it’s like to be old — and Plummer plays an old man very well.
It’s not his first trip down the old path. In 2011’s “Beginners” he played a closeted gay man who comes out after his wife’s death — at the age of 75. Plummer played him delightfully and endearingly, showing us an older man engaged in a happily stumbling zigzag dance from his closeted life out into the contemporary gay scene, ignoring his son’s objections, determined to live life as well as he could, right up to its end.
He deserved his first Oscar— but he deserves this one even more, although it’s less likely this time he’ll get his statue. Hollywood liked his “Beginners” character; this one they’ll hate. Even we don’t like this one. Nobody does.
Plummer gives us an immediately befuddling glimpse into the world’s richest man, a man who says he loves his family, but first ignores them, then can’t bring himself to do anything for them, no matter how dire the circumstances.
Michelle Williams plays his daughter in law, Abigail Harris. Andrew Buchan plays his drug addicted son, J. Paul Getty II. Charlie Plummer plays his 16 year old kidnapped grandson, J. Paul Getty III. Mark Wahlberg plays Plummer’s ex-spy, now paid trouble shooter, Fletcher Chase, and Romain Duris plays Cinquanta, the kidnapper.
And they all play them all well.
Williams is engaging. She grabs our sympathy at the same time she grabs our respect by standing up to her father in law, who proves much harder to deal with than do the kidnappers.
Buchan’s not around much, but as the film shows us, there’s a reason, neither was Getty the 2nd, a fact that, digging deep, lead to the kidnapping.
Charlie Plummer (no relation to Christopher) is a convincingly worldly but innocently trusting teenager, whose early close relationship with his grandfather was done in by his father’s addictions to both drugs and women. (He also bears a strong resemblance to the real J. Paul Getty III.)
Wahlberg does his best as a former CIA agent, and it’s good enough. There’s nothing wrong with his performance. What’s wrong is his celebrity; Wahlberg has given us so many great comic turns it’s hard now to take him seriously. If he’s not kicking butts, playing an action hero, we’re waiting for a laugh.
It’s hard not to look at his horn rimmed specs not as signs of his character’s age, but as comedic props, as things that somewhere down the road will give us a laugh, or go boom, or both.
Duris gives us an almost flawless low level Italian street criminal. Not quite flawless because his southern Italian accent breaks down once in awhile, and he reverts to something that sounds more like his native French.
But throughout, he and young Plummer play off each other well, and by the end of the film, Duris has you rooting for him, not against the Getty’s, but against the darker, more powerful criminal elements that eventually take control of the situation and engulf Cinquanta too.
Yes, an empathetic kidnapper. Imagine.
Was J. Paul Getty, the world’s richest man, too clever for his own good, too used to being the smartest man in the room, crippled by his lifelong habits of negotiation, or simply a miserly ogre to whom money meant more than anything?
The film will give you the answer, and Christopher Plummer will make it stick, because in this film he owns the world’s richest man.
He owns J. Paul Getty.
By the time you’ve reached the credits you’ll understand why the world’s richest man refused to pay the ransom — even after the kidnappers cut off his grandson’s ear and mailed it to him via Italy’s largest newspaper.
