by Chris Feil
On its surface, All the Money in the World has enough stodgy elements of familiarity to convince you it is something you have seen dozens of times. Stately period detail, imposing masculine figures, Ridley Scott’s sheen of seriousness over its true story. The kind of thing where its grey color palate reflects our engagement with its narrative. Luckily the film is surprisingly thrilling and its chillier aspects make an interesting embodiment of the monolith of its steely upper upper class villain. Or even the indifference of a world that allows his greed to thrive.
Based on the notorious early 70s kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, the grandson of the richest man in the world J. Paul Getty who refused to pay the ransom, Money avoids Wikipedia page storytelling by emphasizing character and class dynamics. What unfolds is more engaging for the grudges held and glacial negotiations between the elder Getty and his ex-daughter-in-law Gail Harris, respectively played by Christopher Plummer and Michelle Williams. Here Scott has made a film more interested in character than he has in some time.
The film deftly portrays Getty with humanity, and the effect is that his unfeeling impulses can bruise deeper than the more flat rendering a lesser film would have granted him. Gail, in turn, meets him with a righteous demand for decency. There is texture to Gail’s resolve and Getty’s tight fist that make Money something rather absorbing, a power struggle uncommon for what seems like a very common film. Their dynamic, even when they share little screen time, is the real fireworks for the backdrop of this kidnapping story.
It’s not until the final act that the film becomes a more mechanically composed, once the young Getty switches hands to a more dangerous set of kidnappers. Mark Wahlberg is not much more than a sparring partner for Williams and Plummer as the Getty security head tasked to keep eventual payouts down, and a distraction from its true moral center. The kidnapping itself was a monotonous, months long ordeal so the film keeps those details mostly brief beyond the famed removal of his ear. The downside is the young Getty never gets the personal detail of the leads, making the kidnapping itself lack a human element and the tension of the verbal battle elsewhere.
One of the film’s highlights that has so far been masked by Money’s behind-the-scenes fracas is the fraught performance from Williams. Here the actress delivers an unexpected kind of toughness, a no-bullshit disposition that’s easy to invest in without just becoming an audience surrogate for rage against the 1%. There’s the lived-in, unflashy naturalism that has marked some of her best performances, but the actress embraces the distancing traits to Gail that make her more complex. Many will tell you that it’s Plummer dominating the film but their scenes together (easily the film’s peaks) turn on her quickly coiling rage.
Plummer is quite formidable but not a stereotypical gargoyle over the film. The actor is loose and limber, tossing around indignities casually as easily as he does his fleeting warmth. Getty plays to all of Plummer’s best intangible abilities as actor, the ability to change the temperature of a room simply by walking into it and an emotional evasiveness that still keeps our perceptions of him on unfirm ground. There’s grace to how Plummer humanizes Getty and his financial motivations without asking our sympathies or denying nuance to the villainy. His devil has layers, and some that are for the audience to reconcile.
To the film and Plummer's credit, the elephant in the room is mostly not there at all - save for a few shots where Plummer has clearly been superimposed. For Scott’s renewed interest in character and Williams’s performance (not to mention what eventually came from Plummer), Money was worth saving.
Grade: B