Worth
NetflixConstructing tragedy around a courtroom drama based on the horrors of 9/11, Worth dangles itself deep in the drama of the weeks and months that followed this terrorist attack. All of it is agonising to view in any medium, but where director Sara Colangelo fails is in how she adapts this script to the screen. Telling the stories of discomfort and terror of a tragic event is no small feat, and the failures begin to pile rather high. Add Worth to that ever-growing list, because whatever Colangelo is trying here feels grim, disruptive and not at all potent for the modern era. But over twenty years on from the initial tragedy, and filmmakers are still trying to milk the events for that drop of emotional integrity. Colangelo just about grasps it here.
Such a horrible tragedy, and when adapting it, filmmakers must be careful where they tread. Not just because audiences will feel insulted if the facts aren’t straight, but because the film will lose its grasp on reality if it wavers away from the horror. Worth glumly marches through the tragedy, archive footage and newsreels to set up Michael Keaton, Stanley Tucci and Amy Ryan. All three are comfortably competent, but when are they not? Through the usual motions they go, and with enough competence to drag out the script into moments of grandeur. But those are just the leading performances, and while they make up the bulk of Worth, the rest of its commentary on the events of 9/11 is less than desirable.
“My little boy was burned alive, because of them,” details the opening talking head. That emphasis on “them” is obvious and uncomfortably bland. This opening is out of place, not because it does not suit the narrative but because Colangelo and the script make it a simple one. There is no beauty or horror to the performance, no emotional depth to the words being spoken. Some audiences will no doubt be a little desensitised to the events, more through a rigid fear and glum acceptance of the events, but Worth never realises that to make the events of 9/11 dull is to make them lack their emotional headway. Removing that removes the point, and as such, the performances from the cast are weaker and the script weakest of all.
How much is life worth? Worth dares to ask a big question and follow it up with ridiculous answers that show the homegrown philosophy modern-day events should be shielded from. While it would be far too easy to say Worth is worthless, that is the case. Keaton gives an odd performance that brings out an even stranger accent, trying to blur the Brooklyn dialect with his own voice. At least he doesn’t say anything of interest for the entire feature. Nobody does. Not Tucci or Ryan, not any moment in the script offers up something, anything, that an audience can take away and think about. Few moments offer the poetry of meditation, but those that do stick out. It’s a shame they’re pocketed away into lighter corners. Worth wishes to bury itself deep in the dark corners of tragedy but has nothing to offer those that lived through it, other than a boring, emotionally provocative series of scenes that will relive horrors with vague, nondescript ties to the real world.