There’s no getting around the fact that Danny Boyle’s “Trust“ will be evaluated in contrast to Ridley Scott’s “All the Money in the World“ — or that the contrast is extremely favorable to the new FX series. While the “twin films” phenomenon is prominent enough to have a well-researched and maintained Wikipedia page, what we have here is possibly the most astounding example of twin films in cinema history: two iconic auteurs coincidentally and simultaneously decide to make a film about the same true story (a television series, in Boyle’s case, although the distinction has become far less defined in recent months); the two projects go forward independently with hugely talented, big-name ensemble casts — and are eventually released within months of one another? Wild.
So how do the two finished products actually compare to one another?
It would be nice if they had nothing in common, if each filmmaker possessed such a distinct voice that their interpretations of the exact same story were wholly disparate from one another. Sadly, this isn’t the case: it’s impossible to deny that Scott’s film and Boyles’ series tell the exact. same. story: J. Paul Getty was a sonofabitch who wouldn’t open his wallet to help his kidnapped grandson, or even bother to expend very much energy worrying about Paul III’s terrifying predicament. Meanwhile, Paul III’s mother (played in “Trust” by Hilary Swank, vastly superior to Michelle Williams in “All the Money in the World”) spends every waking moment trying to locate her son/convince her ex-father-in-law to pay his grandson’s ransom.
What it comes down to is this: who tells the story better?
Danny Boyle. Danny Boyle tells the story better. There’s no real comparison. In every way but one, “Trust” is the superior work. Unlike Scott, Boyle puts in the work to define the relationships between these characters prior to the kidnapping. We get a sense of Getty’s relationship with his family: just how close was he (if at all) with his children and grandchildren? Did he have a relationship with Paul III (an excellent Harris Dickinson) prior to the latter’s disappearance? We see Gail Getty (Swank) navigating the difficult relationship she had with her son, and begin to understand what drove Paul III out of his childhood home, despite Gail being a loving mom.
What Boyle does in establishing these relationships ends up reverberating through every episode of the show: the tragedy of J. Paul Getty’s actions is pronounced—yet we have some idea as to his rationalization (not at all the case in Ridley’s version) as a result of Boyle’s intentional character development.
This is all to say nothing of the fact that Donald Sutherland’s performance as J. Paul Getty the First is in an entirely different league to that of Christopher Plummer in “All the Money in the World.” It’s clear from Boyle’s very first shot of Sutherland in the role that this is less a caricature of a supervillain than a portrait of a complex (evil, but complex) true-life figure. Sutherland plays the man not as a cartoon but as a jaded old cynic, disappointed in his children’s’ lack of promise. The character is brilliantly and concisely composed— it’s no coincidence that the first episode, which is the heaviest on Getty Sr., is the most memorable: when Getty is told that his son George died from a self-inflicted impalation with a barbecue fork, he decisively barks: “I will not have suicide!”
The first episode of “Trust” has Getty spending a bit of time with his soon-to-be-kidnapped grandson; the development of their relationship is quite moving. On a less favorable note, the episode also contains an arc about Getty’s sexual impotence which feels a tad overindulgent on Boyle’s part (Getty’s sex ritual involves a male friend reading erotica to him at the foot of his bed while he masturbates, after which he invites one of his many live-in girlfriends into the bedroom for some aggressive, impersonal fucking).
Episode 2 of “Trust” introduces us to two of the show’s main characters: Hilary Swank’s Gail and someone we’ll get to in a bit. Swank, as was previously mentioned, inhabits the role in a way that Michelle Williams was unable to — whether because of the respective scripts, direction, or what have you. Gail, as presented to us by Danny Boyle, is a loving mother whose deficiencies (her live-in boyfriend is an awful man who treats Paul III with remarkable cruelty) are understandable, though they exemplify her bad decision-making.
The third episode, the final one made available to critics in advance of the show’s premiere, is the weakest of the three. It focuses entirely on Paul III’s actual kidnapping, jumping back and forth in time before, after, and during the assault. While the structure is clever and the story periodically engaging, Paul is, unfortunately, less interesting a character on his own. Dickinson’s performance is more than solid, but he shines most brightly when Paul is interacting with another Getty — be it Sutherland or Swank or his father, Paul II, played by Michael Esper. When Paul III’s on his own, messing around with his roommates in Rome, the show can be a bit of a snooze.
Finally, we arrive at the one cringe-worthy element that plagues “Trust” from the moment it’s properly introduced in the series’ second episode: Brendan Fraser’s performance as Fletcher Chase, the ex-CIA spy played in Ridley Scott’s film by Mark Wahlberg. Fraser’s participation in “Trust” is so inexplicably silly and ill-conceived that thinking about it for long stretches has a dizzying effect.
Chase, as portrayed here, is a toothpick-chewing, Bible-quoting, flag-toting Texan, the sole cartoon in a show otherwise grounded in some level of heightened realism. He’s barely competent, everyone regards him as a doofus, and it’s inconceivable that J. Paul Getty would ever, in a million years, have hired this guy to be head of his security. And Fraser’s take on the overly-patriotic Southerner is laughable — hammy to the point of being truly embarrassing. The word “miscast” has never been as appropriate as it is here.
Not to mention the fact that he’s always wearing a giant cowboy hat. And sometimes an American Flag cravat.
One has to surmise that this is a choice, that Boyle wanted to include this larger-than-life character in “Trust” for one reason or another. And while the performance is bad and the writing bad and the cowboy hat bad, Fraser’s presence is never not entertaining. He’s having fun doing whatever he’s doing here; Boyle’s camerawork is as stylish as ever, and it’s totally captivated by the actor’s eccentricities. But even if Boyle is intentionally using Fraser as a sort of comic-relief decompressant, the bottom line is that this performance is unquestionably out of sync with literally every other element of the show and that it makes the overall product a lot more difficult to take seriously.
While it’s not the case that a good film couldn’t be made about these events, Boyle certainly knew what he was doing when he decided to board a TV version of the Getty story. Notwithstanding the inexplicability of Fraser’s sore-thumb performance, “Trust” is the definitive telling of the Getty story… of the past few months. [B]