Worth Plugs Its 9/11 Drama about Not Treating People Like Numbers into a Trite Formula
Oil spills, asbestos, Agent Orange and every kind of shooting you don’t have to imagine (ranging from Sandy Hook Elementary School to Orlando’s Pulse): If there’s an American disaster encouraged by its foundational organizations, be they the military or private corporations and their lobbyists, you may be entitled to Kenneth Feinberg’s expertise. The lawyer made his name in the field of settlements, which made him uniquely qualified to determine how much money to give to the families of 9/11 victims so they wouldn’t sue the airlines. Worth is dependent on an arc of pathos and empathy overcoming this off-putting premise, then stuffs its emotionally devastating content into a procedural structure and box-checking script that’s every bit as impersonal as its initial calculations.
On its face, the drama depicts an ideological battle between Kenneth Feinberg (Michael Keaton) and his firm—which includes partner Camille Biros (Amy Ryan) and newbie Priya Khundi (Shunori Ramanathan), who barely avoided starting a new job in the north tower—and Charles Wolf (Stanley Tucci) and his grassroots organization Fix the Fund. Pull back a bit from this battle and you see the larger, broader war against the American people waged by the upper crust. The point of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, created by the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act, was to pay people while ostensibly preventing an economic crash. Max Borenstein’s screenplay raises and drops points along the way that many deaths occurred, perhaps, in part due to negligent leadership and faulty equipment. Even if—over the course of Worth’s tried-and-true narrative—a stodgy old bloodsucking, opera-loving lawyer comes around to the plights of the little guy, little changes aside from a payout.
Making things even stranger, the race-against-the-clock structure—which punctuates scenes with title cards counting down to the Fund’s participation deadline—is exactly the kind of dehumanizing and trite framework that the story’s content rails against. If victims shouldn’t be numbers plugged into a spreadsheet, why should they live as a percentage on a whiteboard in a movie? Why should they exist as a plot engine hoping to make audience members tense, thinking “Oh ho ho, they’re not going to make it!” until a last-minute reveal?
What Worth comes down to is the difference between a film that makes you cry and a film that makes you feel. You’re not going to hold up to a bunch of excellent character actors delivering monologues about 9/11 losses, accompanied sometimes by letters, recordings or visible injuries of their own. Add a release date aimed squarely at the 20th anniversary of the attack, and you’ve got the makings of a calculated assault on the Kleenex box. But you might feel equally uneasy as the tears flow, as the ending of each speech comes away like a cheat—not as something to humanize these people or their plights, but to humanize Feinberg and his associates. Director Sara Colangelo’s camera remains transfixed upon its testimonials, but it’s after it cuts away, when it’s left to linger and resonate, that you start seeing how the script treats them as tools. Educational moments for the unaffected elite.