The oppressive sadness of every angle of what happened on 9/11 makes it all too easy to lean into teary theatrics, as Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center often did, but there’s something so thoughtful and delicate about how Worth deals with grief that in the film offering just a bit less, we end up feeling that much more. In approaching such thorny material, Colangelo and the writer Max Borenstein find themselves in a similarly fraught predicament to Feinberg and his staff, trying to balance the need for sentiment and humanity with the practicalities and legalities of the situation. But how do you place value on a life? How do you turn a father, a mother, a wife, a boyfriend, a daughter into a number? If they don’t find a just way to do it, if they can’t persuade the 7,000-plus family members to sign up, then they risk lawsuits that could cripple the economy. The story follows the impossible task taken on by a lawyer, Ken Feinberg (a studied, understated Michael Keaton), who, along with his emotionally conflicted team, must find a way to allocate a compensation fund to the loved ones of the victims using a rigid formula. So Colangelo’s drama, which premiered at Sundance in 2020 and has now been given a hushed release on Netflix, arrives with a trail of wreckage behind it, audiences clicking with understandable caution.Ĭolangelo neatly sidesteps these prior mistakes by choosing not to focus on what happened that day (she makes a conscious decision to avoid any form of recreation with extremely limited use of aftermath footage) or those whose lives were lost and instead zeroes in on the ones who were left behind, not sent away to fight a murkily reasoned war but saddled at home with incomprehensible loss. The problematic nature of the many “war on terror” films – from the masturbatory militarism of American Sniper to the since-debunked torture fantasy of Zero Dark Thirty – has also rendered them largely useless.
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The technical prowess of Paul Greengrass’s United 93 couldn’t mask the grim grotesquerie of such a deeply unnecessary project while the cheap twist finale of Robert Pattinson’s romantic drama AKA secret 9/11 movie Remember Me was as ridiculous as it was distasteful.
It’s a question that’s troubled many film-makers ever since the unfathomable acts of terrorism that jolted the US two decades ago, a devastating, lingering wound that Hollywood hasn’t always tried to heal with sensitivity.
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