Grandpa has reasons for haggling—not good ones, but reasons. Ultimately, though, he just seems like he’s not wired right. His grandson’s opening narration suggests that rich people aren’t actually like you and me—that money has deformed their minds—but the elder Getty’s behavior is so repugnant on so many levels, and so profoundly dislocated from anything resembling empathy, that money alone doesn’t strike me as the best explanation for his actions. I don’t know if this is an unresolved complication, a basic failing of the screenplay, or a dimension that Scott and/or Plummer added to the role during shooting.
If the latter, however, what’s onscreen is more interesting than the younger Getty’s diagnosis, because it means we’re watching an emotionally stunted and perhaps mentally ill person with access to billions allow a blood relative to suffer just so that he can save a few bucks. In other words, it’s not the money, it’s him. To most of us, the stated ransom is an unimaginably huge amount, but to somebody like Getty, it’s the equivalent of the coins hidden under sofa cushions. We’d do whatever it took to save a loved one in similar circumstances, but John Paul the First has such an oversized dealmaker’s ego that he won’t take out his checkbook unless the terms are just right.
Gail’s tactical restraint when confronted with her former father-in-law’s iciness is commendable, and Williams plays it just right, letting us see Gail’s anger and frustration while making us believe that she could tamp it down out of sight when dealing with the elder Getty and his associates. What astonishing discipline this woman had! The old cheapskate acts as if this is all just a large-scale version of saving eight bucks buying a statue at a flea market. John Paul III could be murdered or tortured as a result of the stubbornness of an old man who prides himself on never meeting the first offer, and trying to save money on everything, even a transaction as basic as sending out laundry while staying in a five-star hotel (he washes and dries his own sheets to shave a few bucks off his tab).
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46ao6VlpJ2ybrnOp5yyZZmjerW0xGauqKqcmXpzfJBw