THE BIG STORY about Ridley Scott’s film All the Money in the World has been the replacement of Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer after the movie had been completed. A generous helping of digital dexterity made space for a brilliant performance by Plummer as the billionaire J. Paul Getty. That Plummer gave this role his all with only a few days’ notice, and that Scott is such a quick, decisive filmmaker that he could remake an entire character only a month or so from the film’s release, makes this a bit of cinema history.
But lost in the mix is an ethical question about the film’s existence in the first place. (Spoilers below.) It’s bleak, about a young man abducted and tortured while his inordinately wealthy grandfather refused to pay ransom. The movie’s core is the suffering endured by the kidnapped grandson Paul (Charlie Plummer—no relation), and the lengths to which his mother, Gail (Michelle Williams), went to rescue him; there’s a “friendly” kidnapper thrown in for good measure. The bleak is made bearable because the film moves at a fair pace, becoming one of the more gripping mainstream thrillers in a while. It’s one of the most entertaining films Ridley Scott has made.
Here’s the problem: This is not only a bleak story, played for audience pleasures of rollercoaster stress and catharsis, but a true story about a terrible event with an ultimately tragic ending. But the movie doesn’t tell you that. It presents a contained narrative in which a powerful man, who may have been so egocentric he believed himself to be the reincarnation of a Roman emperor, was so blinded by selfishness that he refused to help his own grandson in desperate times. But courage, smarts, and a bit of cash got the grandson rescued anyway. The old man dies, and in a closing caption we learn his heirs have donated vast amounts of their inheritance to humanitarian causes. This is not uninteresting, and the moral chasm of such greed is worthy of attention, of course.
What the movie doesn’t tell us, however, is that the victim did not then recover from the trauma of his ordeal. All the money in the world couldn’t save Paul Getty from a spiral into drug addiction, an overdose that led to him becoming quadriplegic, and an early death. The tragic aspects of the life beyond the story told in the film, no matter how complex, are not honored by denying them in favor of entertainment.
Gareth Higgins is an Irish writer and storyteller based in North Carolina. He is the founder of www.moviesandmeaning.com, and you can also find him at www.garethhiggins.net.
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