Worth – Film Review

Following the horrific 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Congress appoints attorney and renowned mediator Kenneth Feinberg (Michael Keaton) to lead the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. Assigned with allocating financial resources to the victims of the tragedy, Feinberg and his firm’s head of operations, Camille Biros (Amy Ryan), face the impossible task of determining the worth of a life to help the families who had suffered incalculable losses. When Feinberg locks horns with Charles Wolf (Stanley Tucci), a community organizer mourning the death of his wife, his initial cynicism turns to compassion as he begins to learn the true human costs of the tragedy.

Making a movie about 9/11 would be a difficult task for any filmmaker, no matter how much experience they have under their belt. Whether the film in question centers around the 9/11 incident itself or the terrible aftermath that came with it, it’s not an easy thing to do, and yet director Sara Colangelo makes it look so easy with her newest feature Worth, which is an intricate, emotional look at the surviving members of a family who lost loved ones due to 9/11.

This film will surely be called “slow” and “boring” by some people because of how much it takes its time to tell its complex story but that’s one of the reasons why I loved this film as much as I did. A lot of filmmakers would’ve tackled this film drastically different – some would’ve made this a fiery film about the rage and grief-stricken fury that a lot of surviving victims go through, but Colangelo made the wise decision to take a quieter and subtly devastating approach rather than go headfirst into things.

The best scenes in Worth are the ones where Michael Keaton’s Ken sits down with people who lost their family members due to the 9/11 attacks whether it be their brother, son, mother, etc. Seeing them sit down and open up about how much they miss just seeing that one person’s smile is genuinely heartbreaking and these people go into tragic detail about these loved ones. While watching it, I never once felt like these were actors who got paid to deliver these lines. It one-hundred percent felt like real people talking about their deceased loved ones.

Ken informs these surviving family members of this compensation fund but they aren’t that interested in it – they simply want their family members back although they know deep down inside that’s an impossible thing to do. They say that you can’t put a price on a life and no amount of money will make that pain and grief go away and with these tough topics comes one of the most interesting and thought-provoking scripts of the year, written masterfully by Max Borenstein who completely knocked it out of the park here.

This is definitely going to be an uncomfortable watch for plenty of people and that makes sense because Worth tackles heavy themes such as grief, pain, and coping with the death of a loved one. I’m so glad that Borenstein understood how much pain came with this tragedy and crafted a script that feels genuine. Michael Keaton has been one of my favorite actors of all time ever since I saw him portray Bruce Wayne / Batman in Tim Burton‘s films back when I was about fifteen years old.

To this day he is still my personal favorite live-action Batman (yes, seriously) and I’ve seen him in plenty of films since then and even though he’s remarkably famous I still feel as though he’s underrated. You won’t find too many people bring him up when talking about actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio or Ryan Gosling but I feel like more people should because he has a ton of range and can act masterfully in almost anything. With Worth, Keaton proves once again that he is a force to be reckoned with.

But one of the things I love most about his performance here as Ken is that he’s not some over-the-top angry character that yells and gets in people’s faces. There’s never that one scene where Keaton blows up and goes into some huge monologue or anything. His performance is entirely calm, collected, and reserved and yet Keaton still brings his A-game to the table. Amy Ryan also gets quite a good supporting role here and similar to Keaton, she has a quiet demeanor here.

She isn’t used as much as I would’ve hoped she would be and neither is Stanley Tucci which was definitely disappointing, but they did bring their A-game as well. It does lack a sense of punch and spark at times and it sadly doesn’t utilize its supporting cast that well but even still, Worth is a brilliant film that tackles uncomfortable themes and tells an emotionally compelling story.