Old Yorker

  • All the Money in the World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ridley Scott (2017)

    Sally asked, ‘Which film is it you’re seeing today?’  I couldn’t, in a senior moment, bring the title to mind and replied, ‘The one that Kevin Spacey isn’t in’.  And, of course, that’s now the primary identity of All the Money in the World.  The actual title and the phrase ‘inspired by true events’, which appear on the screen at the start of the film, take on a new meaning thanks to what has happened in recent weeks – even if the ‘true events’, the various accusations of sexual misconduct levelled at Kevin Spacey are still, strictly speaking, allegations.  Interviewed by the BBC about his decision to reshoot Spacey’s scenes with Christopher Plummer replacing him in the role of J Paul Getty, Ridley Scott stated flatly that ‘the film wouldn’t have gone out if I hadn’t done it’ and explained how ‘my commercial head began to click in’.   The director has been clear, in other words, that he acted on an economic imperative, even if some journalists (and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, in nominating him for the year’s Best Director award at the recent Golden Globes) have reacted to his removal of Spacey as if it were an act of moral courage.  In a piece on the London Review Books blog earlier this month[1], David Bromwich noted that Scott’s idea that audiences might boycott a Spacey film was ‘only speculative’ whereas ‘the expunging and substitution were real’.  Even so, All the Money in the World cost $50m to make[2]; Scott was arguably being no more than financially responsible in taking last-minute remedial action.

    The ‘commercial head’ phrase quoted above can be read to imply that Scott was well aware that reshooting, by grabbing headlines and increasing audience curiosity, might do more than salvage the film’s financial prospects.  It remains to be seen just how remunerative the initiative proves to be.  All the Money in the World opened in US cinemas on Christmas Day; its domestic takings at 14 January are slightly less than $23m but the worldwide takings push that figure close to $36m.   (There was, I have to say, an unusually good turnout for a midweek afternoon show at the HMV Curzon screening that I went to in Wimbledon.)  David Bromwich’s LRB piece muses on the implications of what Scott has done and wittily imagines an epidemic of airbrushing in movies:

    ‘Take a bankable male who has not yet been accused – Leonardo DiCaprio (star of the Ridley Scott film Body of Lies) or Daniel Day Lewis (if he can be coaxed out of retirement) – and digitally insert him in, say, all the Marlon Brando scenes of A Streetcar Named Desire. A scrubbed Streetcar might claim the prestige at once of aesthetic experiment and moral reform.’

    Blacklisting creatives who are suddenly persona non grata is very dubious practice (especially when the charges levelled against them haven’t been confirmed by the courts and/or by admissions of guilt).  Bromwich’s slippery slope argument is a strong one.  There’s no denying, though, that a particular practical difficulty in withholding punishment operates in the world of commercial cinema.  One can wonder whether the fact that Kevin Spacey was playing what is, in effect, the arch-villain of All the Money in the World might have mitigated the scale of the financial disaster that Ridley Scott foresaw but his calculation was fundamentally sound.  Throughout film history, actors have become box-office poison, for reasons good and bad.  Money doesn’t just talk in big-picture moviemaking:  you can’t argue with it.

    All of which gives All the Money in the World an interest the film itself lacks:  Ridley Scott should have got rid of most of the scenes that Kevin Spacey wasn’t in too.  The screenplay by David Scarpa tells of the protracted ransom negotiations that followed the 1973 kidnap of J P ‘Paul’ Getty III, sixteen-year-old grandson of the oil tycoon J Paul Getty (1892-1976) – and demonstrates ad nauseam the callous self-absorption of the world’s richest man.  Scott is too conventional to realise the grotesque potential of the story.  It’s almost refreshing for a current film not to be described as a black comedy (this often turns out to mean a drama with jokes) but still disappointing that Scott has reduced extraordinary real-life events, and subordinated the macabre morality tale aspect of the material, to a visually uninteresting hostage thriller.  The standard-issue scenes involving the kidnappers are especially boring and Scott’s storytelling is perfunctory.  He begins with narrative voiceover from Paul (Charlie Plummer) that is never heard again.  When old man Getty eventually agrees to pay the ransom in full, it’s not as if his fixer, Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg), has supplied new and persuasive arguments to change Getty’s mind.  It’s just that the clock is ticking on the film as it approaches the two-hour mark.

    The original trailer, including Kevin Spacey, is on YouTube.  The trailer delays revealing Spacey’s face and, for even longer, his voice, precisely not because it wants to minimise his presence but to give him a build-up – to play late what the producers (including Scott) may have felt was their trump card.  It’s possible that Spacey’s performance might have been powerful enough to rebalance the film entirely though that wouldn’t have been easy to do in what’s essentially a supporting role in a bloated, overlong (133-minute) production.  It’s conceivable too that his appearance might have compelled attention in the wrong way.  J Paul Getty was eighty at the time of his grandson’s kidnap; Spacey is fifty-eight and his face is encased in facial prosthetic that makes him (rather ironically, as it turns out) unrecognisable.  Christopher Plummer, at eighty-eight, is still a handsome man – much more handsome than Kevin Spacey, let alone Getty – but he doesn’t need heavy aging make-up.  On screen, Plummer has sometimes seemed too aware of his attractive presence, in contrast to Spacey, whose qualities as an actor include a readiness to come over as seriously dislikeable (also ironic).  For the most part, Plummer makes Getty an outrageous, gamy old rogue rather than inhumanly cold and shrivelled.  This tends to lessen the impact of, for example, the occasional illustrations of Getty’s greater love for human figures in the paintings in his art collection than for his own flesh and blood.  Plummer’s is a more superficial portrait than Spacey may have created but the shallowness is a good fit for Scott’s film as a whole – and Plummer is more entertaining than most of what’s going on around him.

    There’s a lot of he’s-amazing-for-pushing-ninety condescension in the praise that Plummer is receiving for his work in the film (and how quickly he learned his lines, at an age when most people forget their names!).   As with that Golden Globe nod for Scott, Hollywood is also responding as if Plummer’s substituting for Spacey is an act of chivalry, made all the nobler by the positive commercial result it’s having.  (This makes the film, as a jeremiad about the corrosive effects of large-scale money-making, seem pretty funny.)  The cinematographer Dariusz Wolski wreathes Getty’s Surrey residence in stygian gloom throughout and Scott eventually starts cranking up the Gothic atmospherics there.  Particularly crap is a sequence in which a vanload of newspapers, carrying front-page coverage of the removal by Paul’s abductors of the hostage’s right ear, arrives at the mansion:  in spite of the inclement weather, Getty comes out of doors to receive the delivery and the papers fly out of his grasp in a howling wind.  In what amounts to his deathbed scene, he rattles about the house at dead of night, fearful and alone.  Christopher Plummer’s advanced age is meaningful in this trashy finale, giving it a rawness it likely wouldn’t have had with a much younger actor in the role.

    It’s tough on eighteen-year-old Charlie Plummer (no relation), who makes a decent job of the grandson, that he turns out not to be the Plummer in the film that everyone’s talking about.  As Paul’s mother and Getty’s ex-daughter-in-law Gail, Michelle Williams has what is, in terms of screen time, the main part; if this were a normal film, her performance would be the best reason for seeing it.  Though she seems slightly young for the role, her switches between determined, defensive poise and heedless commitment to securing her son’s safe release are impressive.  As with The Greatest Showman, however, Williams is too honest and tasteful a performer for what’s required of her.  When Paul briefly escapes and phones Gail, Williams’s reactions are humanly credible but they seem underplayed:  this kind of film-making demands from this kind of scene a phony emotional punch that Williams doesn’t deliver.  In contrast, Mark Wahlberg’s proficient, impersonal work as Chase seems perfectly attuned to Ridley Scott’s synthetic style.  Romain Duris is wasted in the clichéd, underwritten role of the ‘decent’ kidnapper.  Timothy Hutton (also unrecognisable:  it’s hard to comprehend that the teenager of Ordinary People is now in late middle age) plays Getty’s vile lawyer with deplorable glibness.

    Andrew Buchan, reliably good on television, is John Paul Getty Jr, the old man’s messed-up son (and Paul’s father) – an unrewarding assignment that gives rise to one striking moment and two interesting questions.  This middle-generation Getty and his father have been estranged for years when Gail writes on her husband’s behalf a virtual begging letter to the old man.  (This is in the mid-1960s – it’s one of several flashback sequences that make up a pedestrian summary of how the patriarch made his billions and how dysfunctional his family is.)  When he first claps eyes on his father, Andrew Buchan’s Getty looks shocked and fearful – it seems an over-reaction to Christopher Plummer’s less than intimidating appearance.  Has Ridley Scott included in the final version of All the Money in the World the entirety of reshot scenes involving Kevin Spacey or has he replaced in the original cut only the shots where Spacey was actually in the frame?   In other words, are others in the cast responding, at different moments, both to an actual presence and to a banished one?

    11 January 2018

    [1] http://tinyurl.com/yd4dye9h

    [2] I’m not sure if this figure includes the reshooting costs.

     

  • Persona

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ingmar Bergman (1966)

    Ingmar Bergman’s famous film has been subject to multiple explanations.  According to Wikipedia, ‘Bergman said that although he had an idea of what the story meant, he would not share it because he felt that his audience should draw its own conclusions.  He hoped the film would be felt rather than understood’. The same source notes that his leads, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, ‘agreed to play their parts as different sides of the same personality and they assumed that personality was Bergman’s’; and that Ullmann believed that the cinematographer Sven Nykvist ‘was also not informed of the director’s intentions and left to work intuitively’.  Ullmann is Elisabet Vogler, a stage actress who, midway through a performance, stops speaking.  Andersson is Alma, the nurse assigned to care for Elisabet in the aftermath of a breakdown that defies medical explanation.  Most of the action takes place in and around the seaside house where the two women go to stay, on the advice of Elisabet’s psychiatrist (Margaretha Krook).  The patient remains silent; the nurse talks and reveals more and more about herself.  Alma is increasingly exasperated.  Realising that she is exposing her own insecurity and vulnerability, she also feels threatened by Elisabet.

    Alma can mean (among many other things) soul or nourishing.  Elisabeth, when she decides to renounce the power of speech, is playing the title role in a production of Electra.  These are hints of Persona’s symbolic possibilities – and Bergman’s black-and-white images are even more richly suggestive.   Pauline Kael, though she surely didn’t mean to endorse his approach (she found the film as a whole ‘frustrating’), expressed a judgment not dissimilar to the attitude that Wikipedia attributes to Bergman, in the review that appears in Kael’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang collection:

    ‘Though it’s possible to offer interpretations, I don’t think that treating Persona as the pieces of a puzzle and trying to put them together will do much more than demonstrate ingenuity at guesswork.  It’s easy to say that the little boy reaching up to the screen [in the montage of images that bookends the main narrative] is probably Bergman as a child; and he may also represent the nurse’s aborted baby and/or the actress’s rejected son.  But for this kind of speculation (and one would have to go through almost every image in the movie this way) to have any purpose, there must be a structure of meanings in the work by which an interpretation can be validated; I don’t think there is one in Persona.  If there is, it is so buried that it doesn’t function in the work.  We respond to the image of the little boy – not because he’s Bergman or an abortion but simply in terms of the quality and intensity of the image – but we don’t know why it’s in the film.’

    Exhaustive dissection of Persona is also liable to detract from how excitingly distinctive it is to watch (and watch again).  For example, a character analysis of Elisabet runs the risk of reducing her to a familiar figure:  the artist as an empty vessel, parasitic on others, too self-absorbed even for parenthood.  Yet the way Elisabet is played (and photographed) comes across as strongly original.    An implication that Elisabet stops communicating because she finds the world intolerable – she’s upset watching television news showing a self-immolation in the Vietnam War and by photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto – also has much greater impact than it sounds as if it should have.  I’ll keep the rest of this note to just a few observations – drops in the ocean of Persona interpretation.

    The received wisdom is that the film’s main themes include the fragility of personal identity and the idea that a human relationship is a power struggle; that the trajectory of Persona is towards a merging of the two women’s identities.  When Elisabet’s husband (Gunnar Björnstrand) pays a brief visit, Alma has to remind him (Vogler first appears wearing dark glasses) that she isn’t his wife.  Towards the end of their time together, Alma desperately insists to Elisabet that ‘I’m not you!’  Out on the veranda of the house, Alma breaks a glass, sweeps up the pieces but leaves a shard for Elisabet to step on; later, Alma cuts her own arm and allows Elisabet to suck her blood, an act of vampirism initiated by the ‘victim’.  Bergman realises the merged identities in spite of the fact that his two principals’ faces are really not all that alike:  the cunning visual compositions and superimpositions make them seem alike.    Another merging that takes place is between loss of individual personality and loss of authority:  Alma and Elisabet exchange roles as much as identities.  The nurse, who should be in charge, is increasingly at the mercy of her patient.  The potential analysand says not a word; the potential analyst repeatedly gives herself away.  Until Alma persuades her in the closing stages to say ‘nothing’ (instead of saying nothing), there’s only one point at which Elisabet definitely speaks – she does so instinctively when the infuriated Alma threatens to throw boiling water at her.

    Persona begins and ends with similar montages – a crucifixion and the killing of a lamb, a spider, a young boy (Jörgen Lindström) waking up in what seems to be a morgue and touching the blurred images of two women on a huge screen.  A few of these details are individually mystifying but the overall self-reflexive message of the prologue and epilogue comes over loud and clear:  Bergman wants to remind the audience that it is watching a film.  Shots of a projector and a strip of celluloid are repeated; at the end, the screen even shows a camera being manoeuvred into position by a crew.  In a piece that, for the most part, embodies the visual power of cinema and demonstrates the frailty and contingency of speech, it’s an ingenious twist that a shift in Alma’s attitude towards Elisabet is brought about through the written word.   Alma takes some letters to post; curiosity gets the better of her when she notices that an envelope addressed to the psychiatrist is unsealed.  She opens it, reads the letter it contains and is enraged, and feels betrayed, by what Elisabet has written:

    ‘My dear, I could live like this forever.  Silent, living a secluded life, reducing my needs, feeling my battered soul finally starting to smooth itself out.  Alma takes care of me, spoils me in the most touching way.  I believe that she likes it here and that she’s very fond of me … perhaps even in love in an unaware and enchanting way.  In any case, it’s very interesting studying her.  Sometimes she cries over past sins … an orgy with a strange boy and a subsequent abortion.  She claims that her perceptions do not correspond with her actions.’

    The Latin word persona means both mask and character.  In Jungian psychology, an individual’s persona is the mechanism whereby they conceal their true thoughts and feelings, especially in their adaptation to the outside world.  In theatre and film, a mask is, at one level, a means of concealment but it’s not unusual for a masked actor – thanks to feeling protected, by the disguise they’re wearing, from revealing their own self – to express the qualities of their character more freely than they might have done without the mask.  Bergman’s film is centrally concerned with the fracturing of Alma’s persona (in the Jungian sense) but his actresses, from the start, have nothing to hide behind:  the camera subjects the faces of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann to exceptionally close and unrelenting scrutiny.  Elisabet’s silence and relative immobility afford Ullmann a degree of security:  the viewer can’t be sure what the character may be keeping to herself – whether her face is revealing emotional truth or dissimulating (Elisabet is, after all, an actress).  Although this is theoretically the case with Alma too, we assume that the combination of her face, words and physical movement is yielding up her innermost thoughts and feelings.  Bibi Andersson is fearless, especially in the ‘orgy’ monologue – which is not just an act of recollection but, in Andersson’s telling, a revival of the sensations that Alma originally experienced.  Her great acting amounts to a further reminder that Persona is inspired artifice:  the more Andersson’s character feels trapped and helpless, the more she imposes herself on us.

    9 January 2018

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