Like most films about the complexities of American bureaucracy, Sara Colangelo’s new film Worth (which premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24) exposes itself to myriad inquiries and criticisms. Not so much for the filmmaking—though there are some nits to be picked there—but for what the movie represents, what it valorizes, what it frames as triumph, what it frames as injustice.
Worth is a movie about money, specifically the over $7 billion dispersed by the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, meant to financially help those who’d lost loved ones or suffered injuries in the attacks of nearly 20 years ago. Any movie about money these days, especially the kind that involves government and mega-corporations, is going to sit uneasily for some viewers. Because nothing is ever quite right in these matters; pure fairness always loses to compromise, if such a thing as pure fairness even exists. What’s strong, intellectually and emotionally, about Worth is its keenness to that inevitable imbalance, its solemn assessment of an undertaking that could never yield ideal results.
This is a procedural movie, about famed attorney and mediator Kenneth Feinberg taking on the pro bono task of allotting compensation to thousands of grieving people in the immediate wake of 9/11. It’s a movie that puts the cold technicals of negotiation in dialogue with raw emotion, two inherently opposed forces that must, by Feinberg and his team, somehow be reconciled. The Victims Fund came to exist because the major airlines whose planes were involved in the attacks feared ruinous lawsuits, and the nascent Bush administration in turn feared what that would spell for an already precarious economy. Thus there was an amassing of government money, and a socialist program of a sort was created. Victims and victims’ families could accept their settlements on one condition: that they agree to not sue.
So was this program, in truth, more Washington protection of influential corporations? Maybe. But Worth is less concerned with sourcing the potential rot at the core of the idea, and more with the sorting out of the extant thing. The money is there, it comes with these strings attached, these sordid associations, so what is to be done with it? Enter Feinberg, who, in the movie’s argument, saw the job as a chance to help his country. Feinberg understands that because the fund’s compensation structure was modeled in line with the U.S. tort system—meaning any damages rewarded would be based on projected lifetime earnings of the deceased or injured—there will be outrage and worse, as mourning people come to realize that, in the government’s eyes, their loved one was of less value than a person they died alongside. His goal, then, is to get the best possible result from that discord.
The grace of Colangelo’s film is how supply and thoughtfully it susses out the individual humanity of nearly all involved parties, allowing for quiet moments of specific sorrow and introspection amid the grinding-gear din of imperfect American process. A less insightful director could have made this movie a schmaltz-fest, steeped in misguided patriotism and righteous monologuing. Colangelo’s assured, gentle direction allows for little of that, nor does Max Borenstein’s soulful script. The movie somehow avoids cynicism, or charges through it, without coating anything in the sticky gloss of cloying sentimentality.
Which isn’t to say that the movie is lacking in the tear-jerking stuff. It’s chock full of it, mostly arriving in the form of testimonials from those grieving (played by a host of credible, natural actors), giving personal dimension to a tragedy that has long been wielded as a blunt and impersonal political cudgel. Though actual footage of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers is unfortunately shown in the film, those visual documents that are too often used as retraumatizing cinematic shorthand, Worth is otherwise careful about its 9/11 mythos. Regardless of the U.S. foreign policy cruelties that may have spurred on the attack (to say nothing of those that terribly ensued afterward), there were thousands of dead people in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, and thousands more reeling from that loss. Worth chooses to focus on them, tasking itself with addressing their urgent and long-term needs, just as Feinberg aimed to do.
Worth is not so much a moralizing film as it is one of weary, hard-won ethics, wrestled out of an impossible rubble. To reach that kind of clarity, Colangelo required the right company of thinking actors, and she has found just that. Feinberg is played by Michael Keaton, putting on a Boston-area accent (Feinberg is from Brockton) that’s sharper than his Hahvahd Yahd tawk in the similarly toned Spotlight. More important than the accent work, though, is how vividly Keaton captures the bearing of a man trying to calibrate formal professionalism with compassion. It’s a subtle performance (again, despite the showy accent) and a really effective one. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Keaton so palpably human.
He’s very well matched by Stanley Tucci as Charlie Wolf, a 9/11 widower who was an immediate and dogged critic of the Victims Fund’s calculus. Tucci gives his usual crispness a doleful wilt here, as Wolf butts heads with Feinberg over the compensation policy, urging him to see the true purpose of the fund’s efforts. These arguments are complex, hinged on tainted money that nonetheless may be of some vital importance. Neither man supposes that the cash will in and of itself heal anything; theirs is really a battle over its symbolism.
The gifted musical theater actress Laura Benanti is striking as a Staten Island firefighter’s widow who fears the finality that accepting the money would suggest. Amy Ryan does sensitive work as Feinberg’s second in command, Camille Biros, who, in particular, has to figure out how a gay man whose domestic partner was killed might receive compensation, despite their lack of a legal bond. Worth here again recognizes that this initiative will inevitably fail some people. It does not shy away from the bitterness of that fact in order to bathe the movie in a more triumphant glow.
Truthfully, I have reservations about a movie that could be seen as giving Feinberg a humble hero’s edit, considering that he has similarly mediated on behalf of many bad actors in this country, from the Catholic church during the sexual abuse scandal to environment-destroying oil companies. But in its measured way, Colangelo’s film allows for that potential criticism. It’s not a champion's story, really, but a delineation of how something worked, how it was received and handled by some people involved, what it maybe meant beyond simple victory or defeat. The title of the film refers to an idea that is, of course, utterly subjective. Colangelo grapples with all that is unfixed in this story with wise consideration. Worth finds its ultimate value in accepting what the film, and we, cannot ever determine for certain.
