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.