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.
