All the Money in the World (2017)

I’m amazed that I didn’t hear about 2017’s “All the Money in the World” before watching it. It was a fascinating film, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg. It seems like exactly the kind of flick I would have liked to see in theaters had I known it even existed.

For the sake of wordiness, and because this is about one of those families that isn’t creative enough to come up with more than one name for the patriarchal line, I’m going to go with P1 for Jean Paul Getty (the grandfather), P2 for Jean Paul Getty II (his son), and P3 for Jean Paul Getty III (the grandson).

The movie is based on the real-life kidnapping of P3, in an attempt at getting at P1’s immeasurable fortune.

According to the storyline P1 is the reason that OPEC exists, as he convinced the Bedouin tribes to let him drill for oil and split the proceeds. From there, he structured his fortune and company as some kind of trust fund, so that he wouldn’t have to pay taxes, and was disgustingly frugal about everything else in life.
Notably, and for what this movie is about: an unwillingness to pay the the ransom for his grandson’s release.
At one point he said “I have 14 grandchildren. If I pay out this ransom for $17 million, I will then have 14 ransoms.”
Which… is wrong. Very very wrong. I understand his point in the context of “don’t negotiate with terrorists,” but coming from the person that Guinness identified as “The Richest Man in the World” in 1966, is nothing short of soulless. P1 was worth approximately $21 billion (in 2018 dollars) on his deathbed in 1976.
Spoilers: P3 was eventually saved. It happened in the 70s, so I’m not really sure that can be qualified as a ‘spoiler’ here.

Michelle Williams played Abigail Harris, P2’s wife and P3’s mother. She was the emotional core of the movie, and you felt her stress and frustration and anger with every step in the process of trying to find her son as the Italian mobsters held him. I have no idea what her accent was supposed to be though, because it kept shifting. I think it may have been British, but I’m not sure.

Mark Wahlberg, on the other hand, had no accent at all, which was also an improvement. He was actually tolerable to listen to! He played Fletcher Chase, an ex-CIA-operative-turned-fixer for P1 and whatever business deals needed to get done. It was clear that Fletcher didn’t use violence to get his way, which makes the entire roll seem like one that Wahlberg took by accident, but I still appreciated his performance.

Christopher Plummer played the eponymous Jean Paul Getty (senior?), the oil magnate. He’s impossible to like and also clearly crazy, stating more than once that he was convinced he was the reincarnation of Emperor Hadrian from the Roman empire.

Charlie Plummer played P3, so you mostly just see him dirty and chained to something during the movie. Despite the spelling of his last name, he’s apparently not at all related to Christopher Plummer.

I’ve never really paid attention to movies that Ridley Scott was attached to, but I absolutely need to do it more. He directed “The Martian” in 2015, and this in 2017. They both share some truly gorgeous scenery shots, and this one had the added benefit of a multitude of classical music being used for dramatic purpose.

Now, with this being “based on a true story” and all, a quick trip to Wikipedia shows some parts that the movie decided to gloss over/ignore/completely rewrite for the sake of telling a story. Not inherently bad, but it definitely changes how some characters are to be perceived, like P2. In the movie he dove head-first into drugs in Morocco and was functionally useless after that. In real life, he had cocaine addiction that he eventually recovered from, did lots of humanitarian work, and was, at some point, knighted.

About 10 minutes into the film, there’s a striking scene of a train with four cars attached, on a railroad in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert. It was absolutely stunning to see. It wasn’t even important to the movie that we get to see that train on those tracks, but it was there and it was glorious.

Side note: if you’ve ever seen a stock photo from ‘Getty Images,’ it’s from a company started by Mark Getty, brother of J.P. Getty III.

Had I known this movie was ever in theaters, I would have absolutely tried to drag my wife to go see it.
She probably wouldn’t have liked it at all, but I would have.
I definitely recommend it. Amazing scenery, amazing acting, amazing story telling.