All the Money in the World Review: A Six-Week Fix for an Age-Old Problem

Well, he did it. They did it. After the whirlwind downfall of Kevin Spacey—one of the most high-profile figures in Hollywood’s current, long overdue sexual assault reckoning—it seemed that his upcoming film, All the Money in the World, was doomed. There was no way the studio could release a movie that so prominently featured such a radioactively toxic lead actor, and it’s not like they could just edit him out. To which director Ridley Scott said a hearty “watch me”—then went about re-casting the role with Christopher Plummer (said to be Scott’s original choice) and re-assembling the cast for a rush of last-minute re-shoots, promising to get the film in as close to the original release date as possible.

And here All the Money in the World is, set to debut on December 25, with Plummer pretty much seamlessly integrated into the film. It’s a Christmas miracle! Or maybe simply a testament to good old-fashioned hard work. Which almost sounds like something Plummer’s character, J. Paul Getty, would say. A miser of the highest order, a true Scrooge for the holiday season, Getty was the richest man in the world—the richest man in history, the film asserts—when his 16-year-old grandson, John Paul Getty III (called Paul), was kidnapped in Rome by a Calabrian gang. But Getty the elder, hiding away in his palaces in Rome and London and religiously checking his stock ticker, initially refused to pay the ransom money, holding steadfast for five months until he finally relented in typically cruel and penny-pinching fashion.

All the Money in the World is a depiction of that ordeal, for young Paul (played by Charlie Plummer, no relation to Christopher, who could break big with this and next year’s Lean on Pete) and for his mother, Abigail, played with heavy but successful affect by Michelle Williams. Scott’s film, with a script by David Scarpa based on John Pearson’s book, positions itself somewhere between thriller and character study, relaying the mechanics of the kidnap and negotiation, and doing a repulsed stare-down at Getty, trying to see what could possibly make him this way. Scott has fully succeeded at replacing Spacey. He’s about half-succeeded at everything else.

What’s most surprising about All the Money in the World, beyond Scott’s mad re-shoot scramble, is that it frankly doesn’t look very good, which is not something one often hears about a Ridley Scott film. He’s been working with cinematographer Dariusz Wolski of late, and they’ve produced good things together. (Even Alien: Covenant,about idiots in space, looked gorgeous.) But here they’ve chosen a washed-out palette of grays and heather purples, all dull and watery. It has the unfortunate effect of making the film look cheap, as if the whole thing was a rush job instead of just the Plummer parts. There are moments in the film, particularly during its tense climax, when some of that old, sleek Ridley Scott cinematic magic gleams into being. But otherwise, this is a strangely static, unattractive piece, a stylistic misfire perhaps meant to underscore the grimness of the situation that mutes it instead.

That’s not to say that the film isn’t compelling, nor that we don’t feel for poor Paul. We do, because Williams and Plummer the younger give good, thoughtful performances. (The less said about Mark Wahlberg as one of Getty’s fixers, the better.) And because, of course, we are conditioned to be drawn to stories of the rich in plight. We’re lured by the boggling wealth of the Getty family—well, of J. Paul, anyway. Abigail was only a Getty by marriage, and her husband, John Paul Jr., was a drug-addled disappointment to the family. Still, they were proximal enough, living well enough, when a bunch of poor Southern Italians came and violently tried to exploit that. We feel a kind of indignant rage at them for how they mistreat this cute blond kid.

But the film is then careful to turn back around to J. Paul and investigate his monstrousness, his sociopathic greed, and question who might be the real villain in all of this. It’s heavy-handed stuff, and the script is overladen with J. Paul speaking in gravelly, great-old-man aphorism and anecdote. (Plummer wrings as much subtlety out of this as he can.) But something about its central point still bores through. Perhaps it’s these times of ours, when we feel the clench of oligarchy, or a new Gilded Age, closing in on us. Getty’s cartoonish pinchfistery seems less and less like a cartoon the more you read about proposed tax laws and land protection rollbacks and whatever other fresh horror money and the desire for more of it visits upon the world. Scott’s film touches on that appalled feeling, that disgust. It’s cathartic. People in my audience began laughing at Getty’s increasing shows of avarice.

And yet I wish the film delved more, and more smartly, into that feeling, into its relevance to today. That may not really be Scott’s ken, but there’s something insistent about All the Money in the World’s story that isn’t quite adequately addressed. The film shows—and says plainly, at one point—that people with extreme wealth are so divorced from reality that they become almost another species. Yet it doesn’t fully explore the weirdness of that, the chilling tragedy of it. Instead, Scott has made simply a competent thriller that dazzles only in the ingeniousness of its lightning-quick and proficient re-staging. As we come to the end of dreadful 2017, it’ll maybe have to be enough that the film handled its sexual-predator problem competently. The annihilating indifference of the 1 percent will just have to wait until next year.

Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Full ScreenPhotos:11 of 2017’s Greatest Scene-Stealers

Zendaya — Spider-Man: Homecoming

Zendaya is in Homecoming for maybe all of 10 minutes, but she uses her time extra-effectively. Her performance as Michelle, an antisocial teen with a quick wit, was such an impressive turnaround from the young star’s glamorous persona that you’d be forgiven for forgetting it was even her.Photo: By Chuck Zlotnick/©2017 CTMG, Inc.

Barry Keoghan — Killing of a Sacred Deer

Director Yorgos Lanthimos must have thanked his lucky stars when he cast Keoghan in this film as Martin, a chilling young man who casts a sort of curse on a family. Keoghan elevates Lanthimos’s preference for staccato acting, adding a layer of menace to his scenes that works its way to a grand, bloody payoff.Photo: By Jima (Atsushi Nishijima)/Courtesy of A24.

Timothée Chalamet — Lady Bird

Chalamet makes a pitch-perfect turn as Kyle, an angsty boy in a band who rolls his own cigarettes and lectures on the dangers of cell phones and capitalism. We all knew a Kyle, and Chalamet immaculately captured the apex version of that particular brand of high-school snob. And yes, we know his biggest role this year was in Call Me by Your Name, but there’s actually someone else from that film worth mentioning . . .Photo: By Merie Wallace/Courtesy of A24.

Michael Stuhlbarg — Call Me by Your Name

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Domhnall Gleeson — Mother!

This demented, polarizing drama from Darren Aronofsky has a Lot! Going! On! But no matter what you think of it, you have to admit that Domhnall Gleeson makes a mesmerizing turn as a Cain-ish evil son who dashes into the mansion like a malevolent whirlwind. (Honorable mention: Kristen Wiig, who shows up toward the end of the film for a surprisingly violent and unintentionally hilarious twist.)Photo: By Samir Hussein/Getty Images.

Doug Jones — The Shape of Water

Guillermo del Toro’s sumptuous romance is basically engineered to make you fall in love with Jones, who is unrecognizable as a mysterious creature halfway between a fish and a man. The actor, who’s made a career out of playing a variety of otherwordly creatures, plays this role with a strange sort of innocence mixed with feral roughness—but doesn’t give too much away, always leaving us curious about the fish-man’s story.Photo: Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Brooklynn Prince — The Florida Project

Prince is only 7 years old, and The Florida Project is only her second movie! Ever! In it, she plays a little girl named Moonee who lives in an Orlando motel with her mother. Not only does she have natural charisma, but she also easily holds her own with co-star Willem Dafoe, a sign that her nascent career is destined for so much more.Photo: Courtesy of A24.PreviousNext

Richard LawsonRichard Lawson is a columnist for Vanity Fair's Hollywood, reviewing film and television and covering entertainment news and gossip. He lives in New York City.

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