All the Money in the World

Let’s be honest: whatever its merits or otherwise, ‘All the Money in the World’ will forever be remembered as the film where director Ridley Scott basically erased Kevin Spacey. With the actor in disgrace following sexual harassment allegations – and, worse, sexual harassment, in one case, of a minor – and the film only a month or so away from its release date, Scott recast Christopher Plummer in the role of John Paul Getty and reshot twenty-two scenes. It was originally announced that the affected cast had returned for the reshoots for free; as the film opened to lacklustre returns, it was revealed that Michelle Williams had basically got about $1000 in expenses while Mark Wahlberg had renegotiated his fee and pocketed an extra million and a half.

So: person originally playing venal human being gets axed from the film for being a venal human being himself; actor playing a negotiator profitably negotiates; actress playing impecunious character gets paid fuck all extra; and a film about the fallout of rampant greed inadvertently highlights the Hollywood glass ceiling while not actually raking in many spondoolies at the box office.

That sound you just heard was the irony-o-meter exploding.

One day there will be a book or a feature-length documentary about the making of ‘All the Money in the World’ and it will be infinitely more fascinating than the movie itself. Which isn’t to say that ‘All the Money in the World’ is necessarily bad – it’s often good and occasionally very good – but there’s a listlessness to some of its scenes and an inelegance in the way it all hangs together and I’m not convinced that either of those things are due to the reshoots and/or re-editing. In fact, in anything, the film probably got an upgrade by dint of Plummer’s involvement.

That Christopher Plummer came to the project at the eleventh hour, with presumably very little (if any) time to rehearse, and gave the nuanced and hypnotic performance that’s on display here – enigmatic, inscrutable, morally sinister and just that tiny bit charming – is astounding. He’s so good that I actually feel guilty for saying that he’s the second best thing about ‘All the Money in the World’.

The absolute best thing about the film – a standout and possibly definitive performance in a filmography unmarked by a single bad, lazy or indifferent turn – is Michelle Williams. Her portrayal of Gail Getty, a woman tainted by the Getty name on account of her failed marriage to JPG’s alcoholic and drug-addicted son, is what great screening acting is all about. The refusal to sublimate grief and uncertainty into obvious histrionics; the cynical wariness of the character, Williams effortlessly suggesting that Gail is, at heart, gloomily unsurprised by her son’s kidnap and her father-in-law’s stony indifference; the diction (she imparts entire layers of characterisation purely by the way she enunciates); the way she doesn’t so much play off the other cast members as absorb their presence – it’s something special and confirms Williams’s place in the top tier of American acting talent.

That’s the good stuff: Williams and Plummer. Plus some nice period recreation (apart from the awful monochrome prologue which comes off as a bad Antonioni homage) and occasionally eye-catching cinematography.

Unfortunately, much of the rest of it is a clusterfuck. David Scarpa’s script, from John Pearson’s book ‘Painfully Rich’, is all over the place and frequently struggles in terms of concept let alone execution. The opening twenty minutes are just plain terrible, with Scott’s direction seemingly as directionless as Scarpa’s screenplay. The kidnapping – while John Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer) takes a walk through the seedy underside of Rome – lacks any tension or dramatic impact. The subsequent voice-over narration, by the kidnap victim, strikes a jarring note (he’s under lock and key for most of the rest of the running time: what is there for him to narrate?). Then there’s a series of flashbacks that aren’t so much nested as the nest falling out of the tree and disintegrating as it bounces off branch after branch – these are meant to (a) spell out the backstory of how Getty arrived at his riches and (b) establish the dynamic of Gail and her family. A fifteen second title crawl would have achieved the former and a half-minute exposition dump by Gail herself in an early scene covered the latter. As it is, the film flounders precisely at the point when it should be generating stomach-churning tension.

Nor does it help that Scarpa’s script wants to criticise that moral debilitation that results from the acquisition of obscene amounts of wealth, while Scott’s direction quite evidently has a massive hard-on for lifestyle porn.

Once Scott remembers that he’s making a kidnapping thriller, however, things improve. But here’s the essential problem with Ridley Scott: like Steven Spielberg, the dude made a couple of fucking great genre movies that never pretended to be anything other than genre movies, but got so drunk on the acclaim that he nosedived into a career predicated on the self-conviction that he is An Important And Respected Auteur. With ‘Duel’ and ‘Jaws’, Spielberg set himself up as a suspense director who could have been the next Hitchcock. With Scott, ‘Alien’ and ‘Blade Runner’ put him at the top tier of sci-fi directors. Imagine if Scott had continued in that vein. Imagine if his filmography wasn’t top heavy with middle-brow pabulum like ‘1492: Conquest of Paradise’, ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, ‘A Good Year’ and ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’. Imagine if his subsequent sci-fi outings hadn’t been ‘Prometheus’ and ‘The Martian’.

‘All the Money in the World’ exhibits the same baseline fault: a striving for Oscar-bait respectability and critical approbation when a down-and-dirty approach to genre conventions would have served the material better. Or to put it another way, he was too busy trying to commune with the spirits of Antonioni and Di Sica across an often plodding 135 minutes when paring it down to an hour and three quarters and getting in touch with his inner Ferdinand de Leo would have been much more effective.

The Man Who Would Be King

Posted to coincide with Sir Sean Connery’s 80th birthday.

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they're starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.
Then it’s Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, ’ow’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin red line of ’eroes” when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s “Thin red line of ’eroes” when the drums begin to roll.

These lines from Rudyard Kipling’s bitterly expressive poem ‘Tommy’ are something you can easily imagine Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine) or Daniel Dravot (Sean Connery) muttering vehemently to themselves, ex-serviceman with a grudge against the Forces and a healthy disrespect for the politicians they feel have let them down; men, it has to be said, who were just as petulant when they were in uniform, the majority of their time spent up on a charge or doing jankers.

No wonder, then, that Carnehan is introduced to us picking someone’s pocket in the crowds at Marwar Station, or that Dravot makes his first appearance dozing in a railway carriage and lambasting the individual who disturbs him with a message from his old mucker Peachey. The victim of Carnehan’s wandering fingers and the receipt in Dravot’s tongue-lashing is one and the same person: journalist and aspiring writer Rudyard Kipling (Christopher Plummer). His interaction with our (anti) heroes provides the framing device for John Huston’s enjoyably cynical epic.

Carnehan returns Kipling’s stolen pocket-watch when he recognizes the symbol on the watch-chain as Masonic; passing himself off as a Mason, he inveigles Kipling into passing a message to Dravot. Tipped off by Dravot as to a blackmail scheme he and Carnehan are planning, Kipling reluctantly passes the information along to the British consul. In the first of many uproarious scenes where Connery and Caine play off each other like a music hall double-act, they troop into the consul’s office, cock a snook at authority, and troop right out again.

They next cross paths with Kipling when they gain access to the newspaper offices he works at to consult maps and documents in the planning of their latest head-in-the-clouds scheme: travel to the far country of Kafiristan (the last white man to successfully mount an incursion: Alexander the Great), back some local tribal leader, defeat his enemies, install him as monarch, overthrow the poor bugger and reign as kings.

The extended mid-section of ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ details their arduous journey and the means by which they set about conquering Kafiristan. It’s a shaggy dog story of the highest order, riddled with coincidences, twists of fate, broad (and borderline xenophobic) humour, sweepingly epic set-pieces and two rip-roaring lead performances. The final stretch of the film, when the deus ex machina of Kipling’s watch-chain (presented to Dravot as a gift at the commencement of their lunatic odyssey) compounds a misapprehension by the locals that sees Dravot hailed as a god – any implausibilities are easily excused by the fact that he’s played by Sean freakin’ Connery! – takes things into darker territory.

The friendship between Dravot and Carnehan – the characters’ jocular, bantering relationship and the actors’ palpable chemisty is the backbone without which the film would be little more than some pretty cinematography and a few impressive crowd scenes – is compromised by Dravot’s burgeoning egomania, his to-the-manner-born assimilation of absolute power culminating in his suggestion that Carnehan demonstrate subservience in order to continue the façade. Then Dravot takes a fancy to a local woman, Roxanne (Shakira Caine), whom he believes the reincarnation of the bride his spiritual predecessor, Alexander the Great, took when he ruled Kafiristan two and half thousand years before.

This righteously pisses off the country’s holy men and the scene is set for the film’s justly famous denouement.

‘The Man Who Would Be King’ is bustling, colourful and ultimately poignant. It begins as a Flashman-like romp, occupies buddy-movie territory for most of its running time, delivers a couple of sweeping battle scenes reminiscent of Caine’s earlier turn in ‘Zulu’, and finally becomes a cautionary tale of the wages of greed and the price of hubris capped off with an almost affirmative moment of reconciliation. It’s a high point in the careers of both Connery and Caine, as well as nestling in the top tier of Huston’s filmography. It’s the kind of Sunday afternoon movie that reminds you – with a glint in its eye, a swagger in its step and a dash of ballsy attitude beneath its seemingly breezy exterior – that Sunday afternoon movies can actually be good.

HELLRAISERS: The Night of the Generals

An all-star production of the over-produced, over-publicized, over-long archetypally ’60s variety, ‘The Night of the Generals’ blends murder mystery, conspiracy thriller and war movie tropes into a heady cocktail of WTF. We’re talking two and a half hours of hopelessly confused narrative digressions and howlingly incongruous scenes.

Occupied Poland, 1942: Major Grau (Omar Sharif) attends the scene after a prostitute is murdered in a dingy tenement building. Dressed in an ankle length greatcoat and black boots, he questions a witness who is hesitant about co-operating. And with good reason. “He was an officer,” the witness mumbles fearfully. Grau asks how he knows. “He was wearing trousers like yours.” Trousers, that is with a red stripe. The kind of natty apparel you don’t get to strut around in till they make you a general.

Like me reiterate at this point that Grau is dressed throughout this scene in a long greatcoat and high boots. His trousers are obscured. The man could be wearing a freakin’ kilt! Also, he’s played by Omar Sharif, whose swarthy Egyptian looks, while toned down with a dusting of white powder, remain more swarthy and ethnic than you’d credit anyone with in a military hierarchy based on Aryan purity.

The incongruities continue. The Polish hooker is revealed as a German agent, only for this tantalising subplot to disappear. A Corporal who’s a talented pianist complains at having to play Chopin when Wagner is his composer of choice. (Aside from the orchestral piece ‘Siegfried-Idyll’, Wagner’s entire output was opera or lieder; he wrote no piano music.)

Then there’s the lurching flash forwards to the mid-Sixties as Interpol agent Inspector Morand (Philippe Noiret) – a man whose connection to the events of the war isn’t established until halfway through the film – plods around tracking down the surviving protagonists and asking them blandly procedural questions in a manner that makes ‘Midsomer Murders’ look like James Ellroy on crack.

Oh yeah, and no sooner has the mise-en-scene returned the audience to Poland in 1942 than it’s suddenly Paris in 1944 and everyone’s been transferred and have co-incidentally met up again. Or maybe it’s not such a co-incidence, since ‘The Night of the Generals’ takes another lurch at this point and the 20th July plot (you know, the old bomb-in-a-briefcase under the table, let’s kill der Führer routine) is in full swing and all but one of the potential murderers are involved in the conspiracy.

But wait, you protest. The 20th July plot took place back in Germany. What’s all this malarkey about the conspirators being in Paris? Well, they’re waiting for word that the craply-moustachioed one is toast, whereupon they can establish a new government and curtail the war and … oh, what the hell? The point is, the conspirators have to keep the non-conspirator out of the way for a couple of days, and some fucking genius involved in the production of this Euro-pudding decided that huge amounts of tension and suspense could be wrung from one of the major characters being driven around Paris interminably and having a Stendhal Syndrome kind of turn when he goes to view some allegedly decadent art (you know, the kind that features naked women). This character being a hardcore Hitlerite and having a tendency to viciousness, could he be the murderer?

There is absolutely no mystery to ‘The Night of the Generals’. No suspense. It is by turns ludicrous, clichéd, overacted and pedestrian in its direction. It boasts a powerhouse cast – Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay, Donald Pleasance, Charles Gray (two Blofelds in the same movie! playing Nazis!), Christopher Plummer, Coral Browne, Philippe Noiret, John Gregson and Nigel Stock – all of whom are miscast, underused or saddled with appalling dialogue: Noiret’s is exposition-heavy and, although at ease in English-language productions elsewhere in his filmography, he seems distinctly unconfident here; and pity Pleasance, desperately trying to breathe life into a clunker of a line like “am I to assume that if Stage 1 meets with resistance we will go to Stage 2 and possibly Stage 3” (I can only quote Paula’s monumentally derisive comment: “Wow, so there isn’t a Stage 1a, 1b or 1z, then?”)

All, I should say, except Peter O’Toole. He takes hygiene-obsessed General Tanz (ostensibly the most one-note character in the whole piece) and imbues him with the insouciance of T.E. Lawrence (or at least the version of Lawrence essayed by O’Toole in David Lean’s epic), the provocative and oddly threatening dandyism of Dirk Bogarde in ‘The Singer Not the Song’, and an icily ironic remove that pre-supposes Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.

Armed with cap, boots, swagger stick, leather gloves and a piercing thousand-yard stare, O’Toole stalks through the film, disdaining Anatole Litvak’s somnolent direction, rolling the deficiencies of the script around in his mouth before spitting them out, and making mediocre material memorable simply by treating it, imperiously, with the contempt it deserves.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Insider

Following on from his sumptuous, critically acclaimed adaptation ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, Michael Mann’s epic 1995 drama ‘Heat’ cemented his position as one of America’s finest directors. A visceral, moody existential re-examination of the crime movie, it teamed him with Robert de Niro, Al Pacino and a who’s who of dynamic actors. It was a hard act to follow.

Four years later, re-teaming with Pacino – and harnessing the talents of a post-‘L.A. Confidential’, pre-global-stardom Russell Crowe – Mann didn’t just follow it. He surpassed it. ‘The Insider’, one of the most intelligent and precisely directed mainstream films of the ’90s, boasts the gripping, compelling narrative and powerhouse acting performances of its iconic predecessor, as well as the same slow-burn intensity played out across a two-and-a-half hour running time, but does so without recourse to heists, shoot-outs and chases.

‘Heat’ is cerebral, suspenseful and packs in a goodly number of shit-hot action scenes. ‘The Insider’ is quite simply cerebral. It’s about corporate power, freedom of speech, the strictures of the law, the necessity of conscience, the pull of family, and the integrity of the serious journalist vs the machinations of big business. And that’s just for starters. On a human level, it’s also about one man trying to keep his word and another man coming to a decision about the wrongdoings of his employer and the public’s right to know, even though the imperatives for keeping his mouth shut are very real and freighted with heavy consequences.

Big, dramatic stuff. Now factor in the factual basis of the story, and ‘The Insider’ really takes off. The starting point was Marie Brenner’s 1996 article for Vanity Fair, ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’. A suitably Hitchcockian title for the story of an inside man, a corporate whistle-blower, a man whose family life disintegrates under the weight of potential financial desuetude, pervasive media scrutiny and death threats. Apposite, then, that it was expanded and adapted into a movie whose most tense scenes – an unspoken threat at a golf range, a piranha-like lawyer trying to silence a key witness even as he attempts to give a deposition – achieve a level of cinematic frisson that Hitch himself would have been proud of.

Brenner’s article focuses almost exclusively on former Brown & Williamson employee (that’s employee as in high-ranking senior management type on six-figures and a fuckload of benefits a year, as opposed to how the rest of us understand it) Jeffrey Wigand, and how he went public with information pertaining to the deliberate manipulation of tobacco products for maximum addiction potential. His story was featured on the influential and high-rating public affairs show ‘60 Minutes’, produced by Lowell Bergman for the CBS network.

Mann’s film expands on Brenner’s article and counterpoints Wigand’s struggle against the legal shenanigans of his former employers with Bergman’s internal stand-off against the corporate and legal departments of CBS who balk at the possibility of litigation from Brown & Williamson, particularly with a buy-out in the offing that would net big dividends for the top brass. It’s in a lot of people’s interest to keep Bergman’s section, if not off the screen entirely, then certainly edited and self-censored.

The screenplay – co-written by Mann and Eric Roth, whose then still-unproduced script ‘The Good Shepherd’ Mann had admired – finds a tense through-line and ties together what could easily have been discursive, digressive and rambling. It gives a high-quality cast – Pacino and Crowe are supported by Christopher Plummer, Diane Venora, Bruce McGill, Colm Feore, Gina Gershon, Stephen Toblowsky, Lindsay Crouse and Michael Gambon – the opportunity to engage in the dialogue equivalent of swordplay which intermittently erupts into some of the most verbally volcanic explosions this side of ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’.

Pacino’s performance recalls the glory days of the ’70s, when he appeared in one masterpiece after another. Crowe’s is quite simply the best work he’s done onscreen, more than confirming the promise inherent in ‘L.A. Confidential’. It’s a crying bloody shame that he went on to become so famous so quickly and has essentially not been called upon to deliver acting of this calibre since.

Mann’s direction, too, represents his highest professional achievement thus far. Subsequently, ‘Ali’ proved incredibly well-made but perhaps a shade too reverent; ‘Collateral’ fell foul of an occasionally clichéd script and a stilted performance from Tom Cruise, while ‘Miami Vice’ was an exercise in the visual potential of digital film-making which offered a jargon-heavy script and zero chemistry between its leads. (Having said all that, the forthcoming ‘Public Enemies’ with Johnny Depp and Christian Bale has got me authentically excited.)

‘The Insider’ is a gem … and that’s not a lapse into cliché. Like a gem, it’s multi-faceted. It reflects and refracts and dazzles. It provides essays on the quality of light. In terms of recent American films, I can only think of Alexander Payne’s ‘Sideways’ that infuses the screen with the quality of light so effectively. Mann conjures images that are haunting, sometimes surreal (the sequence of images that open the golf range sequence are astounding), and effortlessly poetic.

‘The Last of the Mohicans’ is more romantic and audience friendly, ‘Heat’ more exciting, and I have no doubt that ‘Public Enemies’ will positively ooze cool from its every frame. But ‘The Insider’ is peerless. I am convinced it is the film Michael Mann will be remembered for.