Movie review: Worth, dir Sara Colangelo (2020)

A lot of shots with a hand-held camera doesn’t save this film from being heavy. This is unsurprising as it’s based on true events depriving the filmmakers of a degree of latitude in the scripting. Nevertheless I did work while watching the film as it didn’t really grab me. 

The idea behind the film is to describe the process following the Twin Towers where the government compensated people for the loss of loved-ones. Michael Keaton plays Ken Feinberg, a lawyer tasked with this job by the US president. Stanley Tucci plays a rabblerouser with a blog who tries to criticise the administration, and Feinberg in particular, demanding that the victims of the disaster be treated with respect.

When American movies try to be French movies you get this sort of ponderousness which can be offset by dialogue but there’s not enough of that here. In any case you wonder how much we really need to see a movie about the injustice that was 9/11. Sure it was an injustice but it had its reasons for occurring, and so far I’ve not seen any movie or TV show that delves into this part of the drama.

If it wasn’t a legitimate source of drama we wouldn’t get croakers like ‘Worth’.

9/11 certainly was dramatic but we must face the causes head on as a society (and perhaps Australia is as culpable as America since we joined the War on Terror straight after the planes struck the skyscrapers) so that it doesn’t happen again. So far we haven’t done that. There have been vague ideas thrown around but as a community we are still just beginning to face up to what happened in the decades leading up to 2001.

I’m really not sure that ‘Worth’ was worth making, in fact I’m sure it wasn’t and that the money spent on this lemon could’ve better been spent elsewhere, as I’ve suggested. When will we get a Netflix docuseries examining the intelligence and Defense failures that resulted in al Qaeda organising the pilots for this much-discussed but thoroughly misunderstood attack on US sovereignty. Some people think bin Laden a hero, some the devil, but the truth still hasn’t come out, that’s for certain.