Worth - Movie Review

Critics Score - 7 of 10

General Audience Score - 7 of 10

How many dollars is a human life worth? Is the answer to that question dependent on personal details of the individual? How much they made each year, how many dependents they had, how old they were, their skin color, religious beliefs or sexual orientation? Those questions are ones the new film Worth that just dropped on Netflix tinkers with, which is interestingly enough based in reality. The true story covers the U.S. governments hiring of Ken Feinberg and his attempts to pay off relatives of those that died in the attacks of September 11, 2001, to prevent lawsuits and fallout that could result in an economic crisis. The movie feels like a Spotlight Jr., expanding on a story based on actual events from the early twenty-first century, hitting some of the same emotional beats along the way and also starring Michael Keaton and Stanley Tucci. The film succeeds in selling the drama of the events post 9/11 being emotionally hard hitting as it deals with the grief and loss of the surviving relatives, even if it never builds up much momentum towards a grand finale. Though the latest from Netflix won’t go down as one of the great films of 2021, it’s an interesting and meditative movie, definitely Worth a watch.

The somber movie begins with some clips of individuals recounting their stories and details of ones lost on that fateful September day, now twenty years ago. Then we meet Ken Feinberg (Michael Keaton), a lawyer moonlighting as a professor?? teaching a class as well as giving us exposition on the concepts the film is about to tackle. He asks his students about settling a lawsuit and probing them to evaluate what a company that sells farm machinery would put the value of the life of a farmer at that was killed on their equipment. The story quickly moves into the events of 9/11 and Ken and his firms associate Camille (Amy Ryan), because of their extensive experience in the field, take on the government’s challenge of settling with the families of those killed from the terrorist attacks. The film sets up the deadline of two years Ken and Co. have to get eighty perfect of the families to sign up for their settlement plan, but the drama feels forced and the stakes injected into the film, just to have a “The clock is ticking” feel to it. They devise a fund that has a calculator for determining an individual’s worth in dollars that is a very cold approach to the situation and many of the survivors take issue with it. In steps Charles Wolf (Stanley Tucci), the husband of a woman killed in the attacks, who initiates a Fix The Fund campaign and begins to go toe to toe with Ken, trying to get him to understand the nature of the beast he’s taken on. All the performances are good but just don’t hit home as most of what’s memorable about the movie are the sequences of grief and pain that overshadow the perfectly acceptable acting of the main characters.

By the time the final checks to the forlorn families are cut, we’ve had a good chance to simmer on some intriguing food for thought. The tolerable screenplay tells a really interesting story in a fairly interesting way, the weight of the death and trauma that hangs over the families in the film is ever present and adds a somber element that never leaves, and no feel good ending really ever comes. The sound design is likewise mostly low tempo and never services the film in any way other than just adding to the sorrowful atmosphere the film mostly lives in. While the film struggles to establish the kinds of characters we want to care about and build up to an ending that has a gratifying payoff, the premise itself is the only thing that propels the film through the final act.

SUMMARY - Worth is an engaging film that has just enough good elements to keep an audience with it, even though with a runtime just under two hours, it suffers from a bit of slow pacing. While the topic under discussion of a human being’s monetary value is a fascinating one, it is also a bit of a downer. Worth is a fine film for all audiences to enjoy once but unlike many other true stories, probably not one Worth returning to many times again.