Fabio Lovino
All The Money in the World
Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg star in TriStar Pictures'' ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD.
Inspired by John Pearson’s non-fiction book, Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty, All the Money in the World recounts a headline story most of us have forgotten, the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III by Italian criminals. But the film triggered its own headlines when one of its stars, Kevin Spacey, caught in the web of sexual allegations spreading across America, was erased from the final print. He was hastily replaced in the role of family patriarch J.P. Getty by veteran thespian Christopher Plummer.
Plummer deserves a Special Oscar for Best Last Minute Fill-in Performance. His may be a supporting role but it’s not a minor one. One imagines Spacey endowed the aged oil billionaire, the world’s richest man in the ’70s, with serpentine deviousness. Plummer’s J.P. is a twisted old man set in his ways. The nub of the true story and the glibly entertaining screenplay is that when the kidnappers demanded a ransom of $17 million, J.P refused. Eventually, with the price reduced to $4 million and his grandson’s severed ear as a token of the kidnappers’ earnestness, J.P. paid.
Charlie Plummer (no relation to Christopher) plays young Getty as mild-mannered, laid back, aware of his privilege yet on a relatively short financial leash. After his father (ill-served by his depiction here) descended into drug addiction and partying with the Stones in Morocco, his mother Gail (Michelle Williams) divorces and receives only child support from a tight-fisted father-in-law with the world’s best lawyers on retainer. She lives better than most, in a Roman villa with a servant, but, as she tries to explain to the kidnappers, she has no money, much less $17 million. As for J.P., a withered old lemon drooping from the vine, he can’t bother to look up from his ticker tap to answer queries from the Italian police.
Young Getty is a sulking teenager trapped in a filthy cell; Gail is emotional and angry, not only at the kidnappers but also at J.P. for not shelling out a penny for the grandson he professes to love. Fueling the action-adventure engine for David Scarpa’s often-inaccurate screenplay is J.P.’s trusted fixer, Fletcher (Mark Wahlberg), a pragmatic wheeler-dealer sparring with Gail (and eventually J.P.) as months of captivity pass for young Getty. At one point he accepts the idea that the teenager staged his own kidnapping to siphon some money from granddad’s piggy bank. But then comes that severed ear.
The heart and mystery of the story, which trundles along entertainingly enough under director Ridley Scott, is embodied in J.P. shown driving a hard bargain for a Renaissance painting of “uncertain provenance” while his ostensibly beloved grandson sits in a cell. The tycoon cares about the teenager to the extent that he wants a dynasty to carry on the Getty name and fortune. “Everything has a price,” he tells the boy when they first meet. “The great struggle in life is coming to grips with what that price is” Later, the philosopher of mammon tells Fletcher that he loves “things” because “they never disappoint.” The things he amassed would later be housed in the Getty Museum, whose structure was copied, as shown in the movie, from the palace of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, J.P.’s world-conquering role model.
The kidnappers are an interesting lot—a gang of amateurs relaying their demands from payphones and living off pasta while they dream of cashing in their prize. “I don’t understand you Americans,” their ringleader tells young Getty. “For us, family is everything. Why doesn’t your family love you?” By the time the teenager was sold by his kidnappers to a professional Mafia family, a mob that specialized in body parts, the answer is clear. There was not love in J.P.’s heart for anything but money, the things it can buy and the power it can wield.
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