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Movie review: The true story of a hostage of fortune

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Film: All The Money In The World

Director: Ridley Scott

Featuring: Michelle Williams, Mark Wahlberg, Charlie Plummer and Christopher Plummer

Rating: 4/5

Based on: Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J Paul Getty, written by John Pearson


The Oscar-nominated performance that Christopher Plummer gives in All The Money in the World was famously – or perhaps infamously – shot in nine days.

He replaced Kevin Spacey who has a stack of sexual harassment and rape allegations against him. Plummer takes on the role of John Paul Getty, at the time the film is set he was the richest man in the world and famously one of the most miserly too.

The book, Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty, written by John Pearson is the source material for the film’s script. The story covers the sensational 1973 kidnapping of the oil baron’s 16-year-old grandson, Paul Getty III.

The boy, played by Charlie Plummer (no relation to the other Plummer), is taken while out and about in Rome and his gangster kidnappers demand a huge ransom from the family. His mother, Gail Harris, played by Michelle Williams, doesn’t have the cash. As she points out, she isn’t a Getty – she just used to be married to one.

Michelle Williams as Gail Harris.

She approaches her ex-father-in-law for the money and he refuses – at first because he believes it is a scam cooked up by his grandson. This puts the boy in mortal peril and his mother in the position of trying to negotiate with the kidnappers, with no bargaining chips. The only help Getty provides in the film is the services of ex-spy and master negotiator, Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg).

88-year-old Christopher Plummer with Mark Wahlberg who plays ex-CIA guy Fletcher Chase.

With veteran director Ridley Scott – he turned 80 last year – at the helm, All The Money In The World is so much more than another version of a chase movie on a timer. While he never forgets the action, he doesn’t allow it to take over from the compelling human drama that really drives this story.

Old man Getty knows what everything costs – or rather what he’s willing to pay – but he doesn’t know the value of or investment required for authentic family intimacy.

Plummer – in nine days remember – manages to get to the core of Getty. He attempts to control the world through his acquisition of things, without ever self-reflecting on his complicity in his own isolation. Williams’ character is the emotional core of this film. Gail is the mother, but not the hysterical, collapse-in-an-emotional-heap kind that you usually find in films, instead she holds it together to get her son back alive. She isn’t nominated for an Oscar – it would have been her fifth nomination – and it is an oversight. Her performance is quite brilliant.

88-year-old Christopher Plummer has 212 acting credits to his name and at 82 he became the oldest winner of a competitive Oscar for his role in Beginners, he could just pip his own record with his latest nomination for All The Money In The World.

Scott has taken quite a bit of poetic licence, as all films must for narrative structure and to create character arcs that the audience can follow and buy into, yet he captures the essence of a family that – as Paul says – looks like us, walks among us, but is nothing at all like any of us.

All The Money In The World is an exploration of the destructive power of excessive wealth, how it corrupts the way we view the world and that – trite as it is true – money can’t buy you happiness.

Paul Getty, who was rescued but never recovered and was paralysed after taking a drug cocktail at a party in the 1980s, was the ultimate hostage of his family’s fortune.

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