Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Trust’, An FX Miniseries About The Kidnapping Of J. Paul Getty’s Grandson

For some reason or another, the story of J. Paul Getty III’s 1973 kidnapping, and how his billionaire oil magnate grandfather, J. Paul Getty, basically ignored it, has been the topic of two major releases in the past year. Ridley Scott’s film All The Money In The World got award attention, but mainly because Christopher Plummer replaced Kevin Spacey at the last possible second. Now, Danny Boyle gives us a more in-depth look in the first season of Trust, a new FX mini-series. How will the Oscar winning director of Slumdog Millionaire treat the topic?

TRUST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A field of sunflowers on a sunny day. Then all of a sudden the peace is broken by a man with long red hair running through the field as if he’s being chased.

The Gist: The next scene we see after the credits is a pool party, with a date card of “Hollywood, 1973”. Everyone’s having a good time then we find a distraught man in a darkened garage. He looks like he’s pretty coked up, among other substances that are in his body. He says he needs to end his pain and he does, via a barbecue fork right under his rib cage.

Cut to a huge estate in England. John Paul Getty (Donald Sutherland), the richest man in the world and the owner of Getty Oil, among other holdings, is being informed about his son George’s death by his head of security, Stetson-wearing former CIA agent James Fletcher Chace (Brendan Fraser). Getty cannot stand that the public might think his son, who was supposed to take over the business, would have killed himself, so he tells Chace to make sure word doesn’t get out.

Getty is… unusual. He has a harem of women of all ages, though the one that challenges him the most, Penelope Kittson (Anna Chancellor), is his closest confidant and runs the sprawling household. His butler Bullimore (Silas Carson) knows more than he’d like about his boss’ predilections, and not just that he likes his butter soft. The man has some issues “down there,” way before the days when Viagra was available, and uses everything from erotica read to him by an assistant to experimental drugs to get him ready for sex. He also sits with his harem and asks “Who loves me best?” Oh, and he also imports a lioness from Africa, mainly to scare the shit out of everyone.

He’s extraordinarily disappointed in all of his sons, all of whom are either dead, had problems with addiction or gone into no-good careers like writing symphonies, like his son Gordon (Norbert Leo Butz). Howerver, his son Paul Jr. (Michael Esper), who has gotten his life together, is ready to go back to work for his father, and gets ready to talk to Getty Sr. after George’s memorial service, when his 16-year-old son, Paul III (Harris Dickinson), sporting a t-shirt, jeans and flowing red locks, bursts into the staid mansion and starts chowing down on the buffet.

Paul Jr., who hasn’t spoken to him in months, knows he wants money, and tells him to get it from his grandfather. Paul III then starts to endear himself to his grandad, belying his hippie personality with knowledge of art and a curiosity about the Getty business model. He tells Getty that he’s in trouble in Rome and needs six grand; Getty offers him a job on a rig to pay it off.

When he introduces Paul III at a formal dinner as the heir to his company, Paul Jr. is so furious he show his father the Playgirl-style magazine layout to show what his son has really been doing in Rome. Getty is so incensed that he rescinds his offer and books Paul III a flight back to Italy, where the kid knows that trouble awaits.

Our Take: We’re not here to compare Trust to Ridley Scott’s film All The Money In The World, which is about the same topic. We didn’t see that movie, so we’re coming to this with fresh eyes. There’s a lot about this story and the way director/EP Danny Boyle, writer/EP Simon Beaufoy and EP Christian Colson have handled it that’s intriguing.

In the first episode, we get a feeling for just how strange and isolated J. Paul Getty’s life was, and Sutherland does a great job of communicating the tycoon’s creepiness to the audience. However, since the episode merely leads up to the kidnapping of his hippie grandson, and doesn’t really examine how Getty reacts to it (he basically told the kidnappers he won’t pay one red cent to free him), the premiere is pretty Getty-heavy, which starts to become overwhelming in its weirdness.

At this point, all the other characters are shallowly drawn, even Esper as Paul Jr., who is all anger and fist-pounding, towards both his father and his son. We see a little more depth to Dickinson as Paul III, even though he looks and acts like a ginger Jim Morrison in his first few scenes. We see that the kid is smarter than he looks, but dumb enough to get into ankle-deep shit with the wrong people in Italy.

The first episode comes together well, but we felt that if we just left things at that, we would come away from it missing a lot of information. So we watched episode 2, which introduces us to Paul III’s mother Gail Getty (Hillary Swank), who lives in Italy and seems to be the only one who cares that the kid is being held captive somewhere. We also get a closer look at Fraser as Chance, the devout Texan who refuses to blend in no matter where he is. It rounded out some things for us that we wouldn’t have gotten by just watching the first episode.

Sex and Skin: Getty tries to have sex with his youngest concubine, after the fluffing described earlier, but can’t finish. And, no, he doesn’t want to talk to her about it, or anything.

Parting Shot: Paul III gets chased out of a club in Rome by an associate of the people he owes money to, then reaches a dead end at a fountain. Knowing his captors are approaching, he says, “Water has been running from his mouth for two thousand years. Just think about that. Two thousand years. I haven’t even lived sixteen.” And then he puts the sack his captors give him over his head.

Sleeper Star: Fraser is mighty good, and we’re intrigued by twin sisters Sarah and Laura Bellini playing Paul III’s girlfriend and her sister. But we hope we see a lot more of Chancellor as the only Getty lover who has her head on her shoulders.

Most Pilot-y Line: The line cited above from the final scene was a bit overwrought, but the first episode is otherwise well-put-together.

Our Call: Stream It, but only if we keep shifting perspectives throughout the miniseries. As much as we love Sutherland, we don’t know if we can handle 10 episodes of the weird, cold-hearted, molten-evil personality of J. Paul Getty.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Trust on FXNow