Last night, before bed, I watched Worth starring Michael Keaton as Kenneth Feinberg. The story follows Feinberg and his business partner Camille Biros as they manage the victim compensation fund created by the U. S. Congress after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It is based on real people and events without becoming a documentary. Much of the story is based on Feinberg's memoirs of that period.
The movie starts out by introducing you to the main characters to get a sense of who they are. From the beginning, Feinberg is established as an expert on figuring out the worth of a human life from a legal perspective. As a law professor, he has his class perform an exercise for a fictitious farming accident in which the widow sues the tractor manufacturer. The scene establishes Feinberg's approach to determining the value of a life.
After the terrorist attacks, Feinberg volunteers to be the Special Master of the fund with his law partner as Administrative Deputy. Their law firm does the work pro bono. The concern of Congress was that the victims would sue the airlines into bankruptcy, which had a very real possibility of destroying the national economy. The law creating the fund was created with broad discretion for the Special Master to devise a formula for valuing the lives of the victims. From the start, the seriousness of the task is clear.
Success of the fund is determined to be when 80% or more of the victims agree to compensation from the fund rather than sue the airlines. They set a two year deadline to achieve that goal. At the outset, Feinberg approaches his job in a formulaic way with a one-size-fits-all approach. This is something that the victims' families do not like as it values the lives of the deceased according to their income, meaning that wealthier victims would receive far more compensation than the least wealthy.
Stanley Tucci plays Charles Wolf, the husband of one of the victims. Wolf organizes opposition to the fund and becomes a leader of the victim families. Wolf tries to convince Feinberg that his approach will not work. But the closer they get to the deadline, the more difficult it becomes to change the compensation formula without it becoming a political quagmire.
As a result as the deadline looms, a very small percentage of the victim families sign up for compensation. Feinberg is under pressure from the airlines, the Attorney General, and the families to make the compensation fund successful. It is after an encounter with Wolf at the opera that Feinberg decides to try a new approach. He had previously tried to remain detached from the victims to maintain objectivity until one night when he was the only person at the office to meet with a widow who arrived late.
From that point, Feinberg decides that they would have to decide each case individually rather than mathematically. Many of the victims' survivors had circumstances that would have excluded them from receiving anything at all. Feinberg had decided to use the broad discretion that Congress gave him in deciding how compensation would work.
In the end, Wolf sees Feinberg's change and decides to give his endorsement of the fund. The end result was that more than 95% of the families accept the compensation offered.
When watching this movie, you see the gradual change in Feinberg from a very cut and dry attorney to an attorney who learns to respect and honor the families of the victims. It's the sort of character growth that is pleasant to see in any movie. Worth is not an exciting or hugely dramatic movie. However, it is a good story in the way that you would watch Chernobyl or The Greatest Beer Run Ever. It offers a glimpse into the experience of real people facing big challenges and overcoming them.
Given Feinberg's success with the 9/11 Fund, his firm has also successfully worked on compensation funds for other major events with similar success. One can only guess that the lessons learned from the 9/11 Fund have resulted in an approach that values both the lives and dignity of victims. This movie leaves you feeling satisfied with how things turn out for Feinberg and the victim families.
