Film Review - All the Money in the World (15)

I don't have any money to spare.

It's become known as the film where Christopher Plummer replaced Kevin Spacey in last-minute reshoots, but Ridley Scott's All the Money in the World is worth plenty of publicity in its own right. Concerned with the 1973 kidnapping of billionaire J Paul Getty's grandson, this is an absorbing tale of financial greed and its terrible cost. Some of the characters and events portrayed are fictional, as the movie frankly states, but the core is based on the case's shocking facts and is painfully, believably human.

The kidnapping in Rome of 16-year-old John Paul Getty III kicks off the film, the Getty family history and source of its wealth being neatly sketched via flashback. The story's focus becomes the boy's mother Abigail (Michelle Williams), shut out from the Getty family's money and dependent on the charity of her ex-father-in-law for the $17 million demanded by the kidnappers. Her problem, and the factually-accurate crux of the story's drama, is that Getty senior will not part with a cent in order to see his grandson returned. So working with the Italian police and Getty's financial negotiator Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlburg), she shoulders the frustrating task herself.

All the Money in the World is a stately-paced but fascinating drama, that looks deep into the soul of a man possessed by his own wealth. The muted colours of Scott's film suggest a grim business empire and a life drained of all joy by frugality and fear. It says much about the director's mastery of this project that the re-created scenes - Plummer taking on the pivotal role of Getty - fit seamlessly into the movie as a whole. Given a script of genuine weight and worth (and not, say, Alien: Covenant) there's no more coherent director than Scott working today, and this one shows him at his storytelling best. 

As the tycoon, Plummer is a mesmerizing replacement. This portrayal is no reprise of his recent turn as Scrooge (in The Man Who Invented Christmas). His Getty is a charming, plausible miser, who on paper gives good reasons for withholding the ransom, while retaining a heart of near-impenetrable stone. This is a pathological kind of meanness, its psychological complexity revealed through numerous subtle touches in the script, some of them darkly comic. 

The emotional heart of the story is the kidnap victim's fraught mother. Williams is a long way here from her luminescence in The Greatest Showman. As Abigail she has a quiet steely resolve, not crying on cue as the media demand, but rather sublimating all her pain and resentment so that she can focus on the task of rescuing her son. Wahlberg is similarly restrained as Getty's fixer, while Romain Duris suggests more humanity as one of the kidnappers than the billionaire ever does. (The squalid scenes involving the kidnapped boy are a regular reminder of what's at stake and how fragile the situation actually is.)

A dramatic slow-burn, All the Money in the World works best as a modern parable of greed, where life is reduced to a series of financial transactions and a human being to nothing more than a commodity. It's a bleak picture, but a grimly convincing one.

Gut Reaction: Immersion in the (occasionally excruciating) drama and wry chuckling at the astonishing behaviour of J Paul Getty.

Where are the Women?: Michelle Williams is a humazing factor in the male-dominated business world of the 1970s. Her mother-love isn't sentimentalised though, it's gritty.

Ed's Verdict: 8/10. Top-drawer Ridley Scott, Plummer's magnificent eleventh-hour performance complimenting that of Williams. A nice change of pace from this month's other capitalist critique Molly's Game.