Worth – first look review

Short­ly after ⁹⁄₁₁, the Unit­ed States Con­gress passed a bill pro­vid­ing finan­cial sup­port to the fam­i­lies of vic­tims in order to pre­vent them from suing the air­line com­pa­nies involved. But the vic­tims ranged from jan­i­tors to CEOs of mul­ti-nation­al cor­po­ra­tions, and in the eyes of the gov­ern­ment and air­line com­pa­nies, those two lives were not worth the same amount of money.

Though the com­pli­ca­tion was seen as a too hard of a chal­lenge by many lawyers, attor­ney Ken Fein­berg took the case pro-bono. ​“What is life worth?” asks Fein­berg (Michael Keaton) to a class­room of stu­dents in the open­ing scene of Sara Colangelo’s fol­low-up to The Kinder­garten Teacher, pre­miered at Sun­dance in 2018.

It’s up to Fein­berg and his team to place a mon­e­tary val­ue on each vic­tim, but from the first meet­ing it’s clear he doesn’t ful­ly under­stand the pain the fam­i­lies are going through. On the oth­er side there is Charles Wolf (Stan­ley Tuc­ci), a pas­sion­ate man who lost his wife and wants to make sure that the com­pen­sa­tion is fair for every fam­i­ly. He fights to make Fein­berg recog­nise that there are peo­ple behind the numbers.

The most hard-hit­ting moments are when rel­a­tives of the vic­tims open their hearts to these lawyers. Some of them don’t even care about the mon­ey – they just want their sto­ry heard. Colan­ge­lo frames them indi­vid­u­al­ly, empha­sis­ing how each one’s pain is unique no mat­ter how much Fein­berg tries to put them into the same box.

In one of the film’s most poignant moments, a gay man explains that he is not eli­gi­ble for com­pen­sa­tion because he and his part­ner were not legal­ly togeth­er (his partner’s homo­pho­bic fam­i­ly also refus­es to acknowl­edge their rela­tion­ship). Unfor­tu­nate­ly, even though the man’s case pro­vides real emo­tion­al depth, he is nev­er seen again. The film is filled with missed oppor­tu­ni­ties of plot points that might have been devel­oped further.

Anoth­er is Shunori Ramanathan’s char­ac­ter Priya, an old stu­dent of Feinberg’s who grad­u­at­ed from George­town Uni­ver­si­ty and was sup­posed to begin work at an office in the World Trade Cen­ter a week after ⁹⁄₁₁ hap­pened. She joins Feinberg’s team to help the vic­tims. It’s obvi­ous that she is suf­fer­ing more than the rest of the team, but what she is going through is nev­er explored ful­ly; her more under­stand­ing nature is mere­ly used to jux­ta­pose Feinberg’s lack of emo­tion­al awareness.

It’s been 19 years since ⁹⁄₁₁; there have been many films about the event and there will be many more. Colan­ge­lo attempts to pro­vide con­text to the ugly bureau­cra­cy which com­pound­ed so many people’s pain years after the fact, but its dull­ness and a lack of empa­thy in its main char­ac­ter means it does not leave a last­ing impression.