by Don Hall

Making a Movie About a Tragic Event

WTF? The attacks on NYC that resulted in the World Trade Center collapsing and spawning the longest American war in history was twenty years ago?

I mean, how could it have slipped my mind? Zero Dark Thirty (2012), United 93 (2006), 12 Strong (2018), The Hurt Locker (2008), Patriots Day (2016), The Report (2019), Act of Valor (2012), WTC View (2005), Ladder 49 (2004), World Trade Center (2006), and, of course, 9/11 (2017).

I'll confess. I've never shed a single tear over the attacks on September 11, 2001. 

I didn't feel any overt remorse during the televised coverage although I was shocked (but, c'mon, not thatshocked—The United States has been mucking around in every country on the planet for the duration of my lifetime so it was bound to happen sooner or later). I'm not a patriot in the same way as most. I love my country and I wept during the January 6th insurrection but the deaths at the hands of Saudi Arabian terrorists back when I was 35 years old appeared too abstract to have any emotional context.

It was like watching a scene from a movie rather than a legit tragedy.

With the ensuing preemptive invasion by the US on countries having nothing to do with those planes and the deluge of films focusing on the rescues of the day, the military consequences, and some ham-fisted attempts at providing some emotional toll, I never truly saw the deaths in those buildings as anything but disassociated from the concrete reality.

More like the attack on Pearl Harbor in my perspective, it was a thing that happened that caused more things to happen and, as I was powerless to do anything about it, became an immutable but sterile fact of history.

Those Left Behind

I saw the screenshot on my Netflix. Michael Keaton? I love Michael Keaton. I looked into it and it also featured Amy Ryan and Stanley Tucci. I had never heard of the director. It was, however, another movie about 9/11 and I put it in My List and promptly moved on.

My mom and I like recommending things to watch when bwe get on our weekly Facetime call and this past weekend, she recommended Worth. I sat down, cracked a beer, and settled in.

The story follows an impossible task taken on by a lawyer, Ken Feinberg (Keaton with a New York accent), who must find a way to allocate a compensation fund to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11. 

Feinberg is the kind of lawyer who deals in the number-crunching of tragedy. The opening scene has Keaton doing an exercise with a room full of law students asking the question "How Much is a Life Worth?" He explains that, according to the law, there is a specific dollar amount calculated with income, insurance, and the bloodless act of tabulating the answer for each of us.

In approaching such a harsh question, director Sara Colangelo and writer Max Borenstein find themselves in the same predicament as Feinberg; trying to balance the need for humanity with the practicalities and legalities of the situation. 

They decide to focus on Feinberg, cold and calculating as a matter of profession. He is built to see the legal necessity of compartmentalizing the horror into monetary terms. It is his job but not one assigned to him. The real Feinberg lobbied for this gig, an assignment no one wanted, because he wanted to help in a tragic circumstance and this task was what he was skilled to do.

He sees the people who died that day as abstract and he approaches the grieving families as someone simply trying to give them cash to supplement their loss. "It's tax free." he tells them.

Worth deals with grief through Feinberg's lens. It also allows us into the perspective of his staff (headed by the always remarkable Amy Ryan) as they actually listen to those left behind. Colangelo allows ample room for a string of one-scene characters to tell their stories of the last calls and last memories. They share their darkest moments rather than feeling far removed, each one modeled on a real-life grieving family member.

As Feinberg feels the squeeze from the wealthiest families of the 9/11 dead—of course they want more money than the cooks and junior staffers who died—his sense of decency is challenged. These are no longer abstract numbers but people leaving behind awkward and often devastating circumstances following their demise.

The gay partner of a man, whom the law refuses to recognize as his significant other, being blocked from recognition by the parents who insist their son had plenty of girlfriends.

The widow of the firefighter with three children coming to grips with his other family and struggling with how to share the payout once it comes.

As the stories pile up, Feinberg is forced to lose his insistence that any number is sufficient and instead interview everyone, listening to their stories and sharing their grief. Turns out that was what most needed in the first place—to be seen, to be heard, to be understood.

Watching Keaton's character lose the stiff veneer and immerse himself into these stories had the same effect on me. I suddenly found myself weeping—hard—every few minutes. 

Worth hit me hard. I felt a kinship with Feinberg in that I tend to see the victims of 9/11 in more antiseptic terms and this one simple film brought home a harsh reality: it's about those left behind. It's about those left to pick up the pieces when a tsunami or wildfire snuffs short a life. It's those still sitting in the rubble, confused and angry, following a protest gone violent. It's about those who didn't see it coming and are left holding the fragments of lives lost to tragedy.