What is life worth? While writing questions on the blackboard for a room full of law school students, Washington attorney Kenneth J. Feinberg (Michael Keaton) in the opening scenes of Worth, based on the true story.
For Feinberg, this is not a tricky question or a moral question. This is a calculation. There are legal norms and predictions of future earning power that determine the answer.
The answer is a number, they say. “And that’s work
In Sarah Colangelo’s Worth, which premieres Friday on Netflix, Feinberg’s formulas are dramatically tested in paranormal tragedy. After September 11, Feinberg is among those brought to Washington to advise on compensation for the families of the victims. The idea is floating that Congress should, for the first time, create a fund for the affected families. This has been done partly out of genuine compassion for a horrific loss sponsored by the government, as one calls it and partly to avoid the avalanche of civil suits that could cripple the airline industry. This is national mourning and commercial interest.
And it is this confrontation that Colangelo sensibly mined in Worth, a grim procedural about the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund that details the complex mess that results in the government bureaucracy meeting human life that is so Not calculated well.
The film is based on Feinberg’s own thoughtful account of his experience, in his 2005 book What Is Life Worth? Seeing a way to serve his country, Feinberg, the arbiter who solved the Agent Orange class-action suit, took it upon himself to know full well that it would be a thankless task to weigh the CEO as well as the janitors. Worth, he takes a grateful call from President George W. Bush, who says he would not wish the job on his worst enemy.
Feinberg has two years to figure out who starts working hard without a simple list of victims looking at his employees. I suspect that many, in the aftermath of September 11th, were following the fund closely, or even more would think its administration would make a thriller. When September 11 has come into the film, the audience has often not followed it. The wholly accurate thriller (“Zero Dark Thirty”) has garnered more attention than the denser stories that weed through the complicated outcome (“The Report”).
But nearly approaching the 20-year anniversary of September 11, Worth is a well-acted, humanistic film that takes a humbling path to a historical trauma. How personal lives are shaped, distorted and perhaps manages to do some good in a dehumanizing bureaucracy may not seem like the stuff of movies. (Although one of the great films, Akira Kurosawa’s To Live, does just that.) Yet Worth slowly makes his case in America, grappling with life and death, value and money. It doesn’t go as deep into the ethical implications of the whole enterprise as it could. But Colangelo (“The Kindergarten Teacher”) and screenwriter Max Borenstein (who wrote most of the recent Godzilla films) engage in several soulful dimensions of the story.
Feinberg’s main rival is Charlie Wolf (Stanley Tucci), a widower who strongly disagrees with Feinberg’s calculations. But what comes up in Feinberg is an argument, in some form or another, that families don’t fit formulas. His purpose of bringing an objective, clinical calculus to inherently personal and emotional harm is slowly grounded by several family members who push their way through his door, including Staten Island firefighters. Widow (Laura Benanti, Terrible). Sooner than his boss, members of Feinberg’s legal team Amy Ryan and a particularly good shunori Ramanathan come to the conclusion that there can be nothing impersonal about death and bereavement.
But as good as the supporting cast are, Keaton holds the film together. Like many of his best roles, it’s a subtly smart performance that’s resistant to the film’s tinge of sentimentality. A story about the victims of September 11th probably shouldn’t focus on money being paid by a lawyer. But Keaton is a really great actor in his reaction to the people around him, which makes for a charming, early tone-deaf listener to the stories Worth filtering through.
Worth, a Netflix release, has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for some strong language and thematic elements. Running time: 118 mins. Three out of four stars.
___
Follow AP Film writer Jake Coyle on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
Disclaimer: This post has been self-published from the agency feed without modification and has not been reviewed by an editor
read all breaking news, breaking news And coronavirus news Here