Friday, January 12, 2018

Movies as machines with replaceable parts

It’s very common to go back for reshoots on a movie, to fix up things that don’t work, or add things that are only needed as the result of some change in the thrust of the story or the tone.

What’s not as common – in fact, I don’t ever remember it happening – is what we’ve seen on Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World.

When Kevin Spacey became a pariah a couple months ago – a scant few months ago when you consider this movie and its looming release date – everyone did as much as they could to distance themselves from him. That included Netflix removing him from promotional materials for House of Cards – and the future of the show, which also was cast in doubt until they decided to go forward with Robin Wright as the primary focus. It also included deciding to reshoot the scenes in All the Money in the World in which Spacey appeared, using Christopher Plummer instead.

Which was, as it turned out, a lot of scenes.

When I first heard this news, I figured this was an ensemble movie in which Spacey played a comparatively small role. A person like Spacey can make an impression in a movie even with a small amount of screen time, or maybe a lot of screen time but in just a couple scenes. To reference another Spacey movie, you could have easily reshot the Alec Baldwin character in Glengarry Glen Ross. One of the most memorable characters and scenes in the movie, but you could easily do it again with another actor without major disruptions.

That’s not the kind of role Spacey had, and Plummer now has, in this movie.

I couldn’t tell you for sure how many scenes J. Paul Getty is in, but it’s upwards of 20. He’s probably in as many scenes as Mark Wahlberg and nearly as many as Michelle Williams, even. He’s no minor character. In fact, you could almost quibble with the fact that Plummer was nominated in the supporting category at the Golden Globes, though ultimately, that’s the right category for him.

Let’s consider that for a moment. Plummer was nominated for a role he had not even shot yet two months ago.

The reshoots – extensive reshoots – occurred from November 20th to 29th. The first time Plummer came on screen, I immediately looked for signs of him having been digitally inserted into existing footage. There were certain visual phenomena I thought I was seeing that I might be able to attribute to this. And though there may have been some, it was not all done this way, as I read now that both Wahlberg and Williams were involved in the reshoots. Maybe not all of them, but at least some of them.

And as the movie went on, I stopped looking for evidence of the way Plummer was integrated into this movie. I didn’t need it. He felt fully like he had always been there, like he was an organic part of this project from day one.

And that’s the miraculous part. Plummer is a very good actor, one of our current treasures among elder statesmen, but I can’t imagine it must have been easy to act in a movie that had already been completed, into which you were drafted at the 11th hour. Not only did he have to learn all his lines, but he had to feel the character, something that sometimes starts developing as early as the table read months before shooting even begins. It’s at such a table read that you also start forging a chemistry with your co-stars, the kind that makes the characters feel like they actually know each other, and brings out the best from everyone.

Plummer didn’t need any of that. He took what was kind of the equivalent of acting against a green screen and knocked it out of the park. Having seen the film, I can say that Golden Globe nomination was fully warranted, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see an Oscar nomination following in due course. If it did so, it would not just be a symbolic snubbing of Spacey and a celebration of Plummer’s heroics in replacing him. It would be a genuine reward for genuinely great work.

Even more impressive: Plummer is nearly 90 years old. He was 87 at the time of shooting but has turned 88 since. That’s a lot closer in age to what Getty was during the events of the film than Spacey is, which makes the original casting of Spacey all the stranger. (Scott now says it was because the studio wanted a "bigger name" than Plummer, who was his original choice – though I sometimes take what Scott says with a grain of salt. I also bristle at the notion that Plummer is not a big name, though it's probably true -- I mean, the guy was in The Sound of Music for crying out loud.) 

It’s funny that a direct replacement for Spacey would have been someone 30 years his senior, and I wonder if they actually aged Spacey up with makeup, considering that the 58-year-old is meant to have teenage grandchildren. Anyway, it’s a much better choice for the film and the fact that the actor was in his late 80s didn’t prevent him from giving the performance the film probably always deserved.

Holy shit, I just checked what Spacey was to have looked like in this film, and they did indeed age him. See below:


It appears that this would have been, could have been, a career-defining type of role for Spacey, something that might have earned him tons of praise, or at least some hosannas over his range. That he was denied this kind of makes it all the sweeter. 

I can’t even imagine Spacey in the role, even with the latex making him age appropriate. In one sense I can – J. Paul Getty had something monstrous about him that he undoubtedly shares in common with Spacey. I mean, this is a man who refused to pay the ransom for his grandson’s kidnapping, eventually leading the boy to have an ear cut off before Getty finally figured out a way to make the ransom payment tax deductible. (Sorry, I guess that’s a spoiler, but the film is based on a true story.) But the fact that there is something undeniably paternalistic about Plummer, something innately human that Spacey doesn’t have, makes his monstrous qualities all the more chilling. Here is a man who seems like he has huge amounts of empathy and the capacity for sentimentality, who still refuses to part with an inconsequential percentage of his fortune to save someone he admits to being quite fond of. I don’t know that I would have bought that from Spacey, who cannot express genuine human warmth even in the best of times.

More than anything, as teased in the title of this post, I find this an interesting commentary on what is possible with a film that’s on the verge of release. If a machine is broken, you don’t trash the machine – you just replace the broken part. However, you usually wouldn’t expect to get that machine on the schedule you originally planned to get it. There would be some kind of delay.

With All the Money in the World, they replaced the broken part … without any delay. And we’re not talking about a car with one of its hub caps missing. We’re talking about a car that needed an engine overhaul. I’m having trouble imagining a larger part of a movie that needed to be changed in order to salvage it. Considerably lesser changes might logically prompt a studio to delay the release by six months.  

I guess it’s just another of the undeniable miracles that is Ridley Scott, who I trashed on this blog just two days ago. At age 80, Scott is not only making films at a ridiculous pace – this is his second of 2017 after Alien: Covenant – but he’s making large scale movies, and then sometimes he’s having to reconfigure those movies just weeks before their release. In something like All the Money in the World, he also makes it look effortless.

I gave the film only 3.5 stars out of five, but I’m wondering if that four-star rating was more appropriate, even if only in recognition of what Scott and Plummer did. But it wouldn’t be just in recognition of them, as Michelle Williams is great in this movie, and Wahlberg is better than he usually is. It’s a really solid movie, and it’s also a triumph over psychopaths who seduce and rape underage boys. Win win. 

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