Worth was originally reviewed at Sundance 2020.
PLOT: Following 9/11, attorney Kenneth Feinberg (Michael Keaton) is put in charge of the 9/11 Victim’s Compensation Fund by congress. Once he starts work, he realizes that his cold, mathematical way of putting a value on lives lost is not going to work, especially once he meets a charismatic community organizer (Stanley Tucci) whose wife perished in the attacks.
REVIEW: How much is a life worth? That’s the question at the heart of Sara Colangelo’s Worth, a straightforward but effective look at the work that went into finding a just way to compensate the people left behind when their loved ones died on September 11th, 2001. At its best, it’s an imperfect system, with the film fully acknowledging the hard realities faced by some dependents, particularly as far as it comes to same-sex partners. However, Worth is ultimately a hopeful movie, with all involved with the fund depicted as sincerely committed to doing right by the families left behind.
It’s certainly a great showcase for Michael Keaton playing Kenneth Feinberg. With his Boston accent and haughty demeanor, the role is a stretch for Keaton, who’s usually cast as a man of the people. He’s terrific, with him evoking the fact that Feinberg has a genuine wish to help, even if he, at first, stubbornly refuses to get involved on an emotional level as it makes his job too hard. Throughout the film, we watch as he’s forced to open his heart to the families and acknowledge that a simple mathematical formula is no way to measure a person’s worth.
What makes his job pressing is that lawsuits from the thousands of families involved could potentially tank the economy. That said, the salaries earned are so diverse that he’s faced with massive pushback from the families of elite earners. The pressure is – basically – to assign them a higher worth, but even that isn’t as clear cut and black and white as it seems. Keaton is admirably restrained – he’s playing a guy who’s level headed in the job he has to do and not ruled by emotion, but you also get the sense of him dropping his reserve as it goes on. It’s a really strong showcase role for Keaton, and it’s a treat to see him as the full-fledged lead.
He’s supported by a great cast, including Stanley Tucci as the compassionate victim’s rights advocate Charles Wolf, who, while he doesn’t presume to have answers as to what’s fair, knows a formula won’t do the trick. The film only ever has one big heated confrontation, and it’s a great one between Keaton and Tucci where each tries to argue that their way is right, and the film never paints either into a corner.
Worth also manages to be dramatic without ever being melodramatic or schmaltzy. They even tackle another unpleasant truth – that some of the people who died had secrets of their own, through a dynamic subplot involving a heroic fireman’s widow played by Laura Benanti in a standout part. Amy Ryan is also excellent as Feinberg’s law partner, who’s as emotional as he is detached, while Shunori Ramanthan gives the film a personal edge playing a lawyer who was supposed to start work at a law firm in one of the towers the day after the attacks happened.
As far as docudramas go, Worth Is an extremely effective one thanks to the uniformly excellent cast and Colangelo’s restrained handling of the material. It would have been easy to make this into a tear-jerker, and while certainly some tears may be shed watching this, they are well-earned. It’s a fascinating look into what must have been an exceedingly difficult task, while also dramatizing one of the defining moments in our generation, a subject that, almost nineteen years later, is still relatively taboo.