All the Money in the World
starring Michelle Williams, Christopher Plummer, Mark Mahlberg, Romain Duris, Timothy Hutton and Charlie Plummer
screenplay by David Scarpa
directed by Ridley Scott
Rating: ♦♦♦♦◊
When I was a kid my mother told me that J. Paul Getty was the richest man in the world. Howard Hughes was still alive then, so it could have been either one. Or maybe someone else. What did Mom know? She’s also told me that 999,999,999 was the biggest number! Probably Getty. An interesting thing is that not only was he the richest man in the world in his lifetime, but that also made him the richest person who had ever lived in all human history. Interesting.
All the Money in the World is based on real events in the Getty family. The story is based on the kidnapping in Italy in 1973 of J. Paul Getty III, the grandson on the Old Man himself. The movie is based on the John Pearson book Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1995). It depicts Getty Sr.’s refusal to cooperate with the extortion demands of kidnappers from the organized crime Mafia group ‘Ndrandheta, who abducted his grandson John Paul Getty III in 1973. John Paul Getty III was a teenager at the time. He never recovered from the shock of it - they cut off a piece of ear to prove to the Old Man that they actually had him and that the kidnapping was legitimate rather than some elaborate fraud by the family to squeeze money from him. He died at age 54 in 2011 after enduring decades of complications from drug and alcohol abuse. A largely wasted, useless life that squandered its potential and its advantages.
All the Money in the World illustrates a number of overlapping pathologies: the morally corrupting influence of vast wealth; the deterioration of the soul through isolation, fantasy and megalomania, cultivated by sycophantic dependents; the destruction of the family through paranoia; the over-dependence of one’s environment on a single element, followed by a feeding frenzy upon that element’s demise. I don’t know anything real and factual about J. Paul Getty, really. But Christopher Plummer’s portrayal puts him across as a mean, pathetic, irrelevant shadow of a human being. The richest man in the world who lived like a - well, not like a wealthy man, anyway. It’s difficult to watch a feature-length movie about such an odious creature.
I was very interested to see Timothy Hutton playing Getty Sr.’s lawyer, Oswald Hinge. I had to go back and watch some scenes again just to identify him. He was okay. Mark Wahlberg plays Fletcher Chace, a former CIA agent working as a fixer for Getty Sr. It’s Chace’s job to go to Italy and to coordinate things among Getty Sr., his estranged ex-daughter-in-law, the Italian police, and the kidnappers. The character is unappealing, but Wahlberg performs it reasonably well. Like Leonardo DiCaprio, I am not a Wahlberg fan, so it’s pretty high praise for me to call his performance “reasonable.”