Ridley Scott, “All the Money in the World” (2017)
Intended as a character study on the ways in which people use and abuse power and wealth, “All the Money …” ends up a heavy-handed screed featuring various character stereotypes instead of characters based on actual people. The film revolves around the kidnapping of rich oil heir John Paul Getty III by ‘Ndrangheta mobsters in Rome in 1973. The 16-year-old Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer) is spirited into the countryside by the Calabrian soldati who try to ransom him for US$17 million. News of the ransom is relayed to his mother, Gail Harris (Michelle Williams) and his grandfather John Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer) who respond in very different ways to the kidnapping: Gail is frantic at the news and desperate to get her son back, while JPG himself is more concerned that paying the ransom will only encourage more potential kidnappers to try to abduct his other grandchildren.
From there the movie dives into brief and hurried flashbacks to bring viewers up to speed on why Harris constantly implores old JPG for the money while the Calabrians wonder what the hold-up is and are becoming desperate with holding the boy and having to feed him. We learn that JPG was frugal and stingy with both his wealth and his love in his relationship with his son Paul (Andrew Buchan) who grows into a rather feckless husband and father while Harris tries to keep her family together and to pay the rent and other bills on time. Suddenly Paul Junior gets a job from JPG but it leads into too much easy wealth and pleasure, and before you know it, Paul Junior and Harris’ marriage ends in divorce. Harris gets custody of their four children but no alimony (courtesy of a vengeful father-in-law) so that when her eldest child is kidnapped, she is virtually penniless.
Flung back into the present day (of 1973), we viewers then follow two plot strands: Harris’ attempts to plead with and wheedle money out of a stubborn and miserly JPG and the kidnappers’ growing impatience with Harris, wondering why such a supposedly rich woman is taking so long to pay the ransom. In the meantime, JPG hires ex-CIA operative and current Getty Oil negotiator Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg in an underwhelming role) to investigate the kidnapping and rescue the boy … with as little expense, financial that is, as possible. The kidnappers, led by Cinquanta (Romain Duris), horse-trade Paul Getty III to their ‘Ndrangheta bosses – one of whom is Saverio Mammoliti (Marco Leonardi) – and the Calabrians scale up the intensity of their negotiations and their brutal treatment of their captive, culminating in the removal of his right ear and mailing it off to an Italian news media outlet to demonstrate that they mean business.
The acting is uneven: Plummer revels in his role as the scrooge oil billionaire, given that he stepped into the role at short notice after director Ridley Scott decided to replace Kevin Spacey as JPG and scrapped all that actor’s scenes after Spacey was hit with allegations (as yet unproven at this time of review) of sexual harassment and assault. Plummer easily holds centre stage in all his scenes, pulling off JPG’s miserly, mean and manipulative behaviour in a way that cannot be resisted by those who come within his radioactive orbit. (I wonder if Spacey’s scrapped scenes are as good as Plummer’s and I suspect they are or possibly even better, and my suspicion that Spacey is the better actor might help explain why Scott rushed to replace all his scenes: a sterling acting performance would garner much audience sympathy for Spacey and none for his accusers.) On the other hand, Wahlberg has very little to do as the ineffectual Chase. Charlie Plummer’s Paul Getty III shows enough feistiness and bravado to combat the bumbling peasant gangsters and escape from them briefly; if he’d been given more to do, he might have become a character viewers could care about – but how much can a young teenage captive in the hands of a powerful criminal organisation do? Williams as the worried mother gives a good performance but again one has the impression that she could have given a lot more had her character been allowed more development. Minor cast members – in particular those playing JPG’s lawyers – put in serviceable performances as everyday people all looking out for number one. Indeed, the only character audiences are likely to have any sympathy for as a developed character is Cinquanta, the leader of the small-time crooks who kidnap the boy: his is the only character who appears to care for the boy as he is and who, in another universe, might have had a deep friendship with him in spite of their cultural and class differences.
Overall the film is solid if a bit slow for most modern audiences, and near the end of the film liberties are taken in the way Paul Getty III is eventually recovered, to maintain audience interest in a film of little action and mostly dull talk. Direction is competent without being outstanding – for Ridley Scott, his career high came early with “Alien” and “Blade Runner” and since then the career direction has been downhill, roller-coaster style – and the cinematography is good without being remarkable.
While the lesson about the importance of family vis-a-vis money is very sledgehammer earnest, it seems that everyone involved – even Gail Harris to some extent – is obsessed with wielding power and influence over others. For all the cultural differences between so-called money-hungry Americans and the supposedly family-loving and communal Italians, and how the rich and the poor live parallel lives and only rarely mix except in extraordinary events such as a kidnapping, there are moments in the film where the two opposed sides have more in common than perhaps even Scott and his script-writers realise: the Calabrian mobsters are prepared to press-gang their mothers and grandmothers into the drudgery of factory work making fake designer hand-bags, and have such a hold over their communities that even the police and ordinary citizens have to co-operate with them; Gail Harris finds the only way to extract anything from JPG is to think and act like him; and Chase uses the power he has in providing security detail for JPG’s family to berate and shame the old fellow. The times when an alternative and perhaps happier universe, free of the class antagonisms and obsession with material things and values, opens up are when Cinquanta and Paul Getty III have brief conversations but the script has no time or space to explore these short-lived possibilities.
Although the film has a happy ending, and the end credits suggest that JPG’s wealth was put to good use for the benefit of the American public, what transpired after Paul Getty III was reunited with his family is even more tragic than the kidnapping which came to define the oil heir’s life: suffering from trauma, much of it avoidable, from his abduction, the prolonged haggling over his ransom and the mutilation of his ear, Paul Getty III went off the rails with drink and drug addictions that climaxed in liver failure and a stroke at the age of 25 years. He lived as a partly blind and paralysed quadriplegic for the rest of his life until his death in 2011. At the same time, there were comic aspects to his abduction: many delays that occurred during his captivity were the result of postal strikes in Italy which meant that sometimes correspondence between his captors and his family and Italian police was slow; and the negotiations over the ransom money to the extent that the value of the teenager’s life went from a respectable US$17 million to a measly $4 million were at once petty and pathetic. A great director would have appreciated and tried to emphasise the tragicomic aspects of the defining event of Paul Getty III’s life and what they imply about how the pursuit of the capitalist dream deadens and ultimately kills the pursuer’s soul and sense of values. Unfortunately Ridley Scott is not that director – his approach and vision are too pedestrian.