Worth

Director: Sara Colangelo
Starring: Michael Keaton, Stanley Tucci, Amy Ryan, Tate Donovan, Shunori Ramanthan, Laura Benanti, Talia Balsam, Marc Maron, Chris Tardio, Victor Slezak
Running Time: 118 min.
Rating: PG-13 

★★★ (out of ★★★★) 

For the longest time any discussion about a movies focusing on 9/11 would revolve around one question: "Too soon?" But as years passed and more were released, those concerns eventually faded into the background, replaced with conversations about how accurately and tastefully this particular part of history would be handled. Paul Greengrass' United 93 set the gold standard in 2006, with most others that followed falling short, even occasionally using the tragedy as mere window dressing to tell another story altogether. With Worth, director Sara Colangelo takes a slightly different approach, zeroing in on a controversial aspect of its aftermath that's never been this exhaustively dramatized. The legalities and ethics related to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund is fertile territory, with many still somewhat unaware of the exact complications and challenges surrounding it. And you'd be hard-pressed to find a more accurate title for the film than Worth, as it most definitely addresses the many meanings and implications that word carries. 

If this has a deficit, it's that some may find it clinical or dry in how it hits the same note repeatedly, albeit in slightly different ways. Luckily, that's offset by not only how elegantly and efficiently that note is struck, but a compelling lead performance that helps in juggling such a sensitive topic. This just so happens to echo the ethical dilemma its protagonist is faced with, attempting to quantify something so steeped in human emotion that any decision he makes will at least feel wrong. What's the monetary value of a human life? That's the big question, and whatever formula he and his legal team can come up with to please the powers that be simply won't hold in this scenario. It's only when he truly comes around to acknowledge and listen to the victims' families and their needs that some kind of path to justice can be forged. The story's best when focusing directly on that, walking us through the messy, uncomfortable process of eventually getting there.

Selected by the Attorney General to serve as special master to disseminate funds to the families and victims directly impacted by the 9/11 attack, lawyer Kenneth Feinberg (Michael Keaton) eagerly accepts the appointment, believing his extensive experience in dispute resolution make him an ideal fit for the position. But the primary purpose of the fund is for the government to avoid the inevitable barrage of impending lawsuits that would potentially cripple major industries and destroy the economy. Working pro bono with co-counsel Camille Biros (Amy Ryan) and the rest of his assembled team, Feinberg must determine proper compensation using a fairly inflexible plan he's objectively devised based on variety of socio-economic factors and circumstances under the law. 

Feinberg's given a limited amount of leeway from the government as he's faced with an almost impossibly tight deadline to get these families on board. After a chilly start that sees him scientifically discounting any emotion from his stringent equation, he draws the ire of Charles Wolf (Stanley Tucci), whose wife died in the north tower.  Becoming the program's harshest critic, he creates the web site, "Fix The Fund," but it isn't until Feinberg stops calculating and actually listens that he wakes up to the true enormity and purpose of the job put in front of him.    

Sitting on the shelf for over a year before finally dropping on Netflix, this is noticeably more intelligent and restrained than anyone could expect given its extended post-production history. Keaton's in nearly every scene, sporting a noticeably thick Massachusetts accent for what's probably his most prominent leading turn since 2015's criminally underrated The Founder, even as the material's likelier to remind audiences of Spotlight. But more like the former, he's again inhabiting a character on shaky moral ground throughout, regardless of his intentions. It's a tricky part, but one that again benefits from the actor's fast-talking edginess, as Feinberg constantly straddles that line between hero and villain while still remaining relatably human. On one hand, he can be viewed as a dedicated public servant, taking on a Herculean task no one in their right mind would dream of signing up for. Then again, must of that is quickly erased once we realize how he's going about it, which marks him early on as another disimpassioned bureaucrat looking to cut corners just to save a buck.

Keaton excels at conveying Feinberg's lack of self-awareness, plowing through his formula while displaying little regard for the mitigating factors involved. It's not that he doesn't care, it's that he cares in the wrong way, and it isn't until Charles Wolf enters the picture that he starts second-guessing his entire approach. Tucci's plays Wolf refreshingly against type, his character approaching the situation with common sense and respect rather than hostility. He aims to meet Feinberg on a certain level as opposed to merely reprimanding him and it works since the attorney doesn't have much of a choice. He's taking a pounding from all sides, whether it's the families, the government or the airline industry. 

Keaton's most memorable moment finds him in front of a room of distraught, grieving families attempting to explain his plan, soon looking as if he's about to crawl into a hole after unintentionally offending everyone with his business-like demeanor and condescending word choices. An unexpected phone call from President Bush sarcastically and almost comically "congratulating" him lets the lawyer know exactly what he's gotten into. There are also some strong supporting performances from Laura Benanti and Chris Tardio as the surviving wife and brother of a firefighter who died in the tower, Tate Donovan as an opposing lawyer looking to launch a class action suit and Shunori Ramanthan as a member of Feinberg's team with a personal connection to the attacks.

Max Borenstein's screenplay suceeds in making the realizations that Feinberg reaches seem as organic as possible, even if it's due mostly to Keaton's mastery at juggling a complicated range of emotions and reactions that sell an ending that may seem a little too pat for some. But it works, largely because Colangelo (no stranger to challenging material having directed The Kindergarten Teacher) ackowledges there's little about this fund that will ever be celebrated given the context, managing to strike an appropriate tone that stops short of over-sentimentality. She also wisely refrains from using reenactments, choosing instead to sparingly intersperse actual news footage when it's called for.  As an overlooked corner of the 9/11 story that hasn't properly been given its due, Worth proves to be a low-key, eye-opening examination of those who were left to pick up the pieces of what happened that day. 

The Kindergarten Teacher

Director: Sara Colangelo
Starring: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Parker Sevak, Michael Chernus, Gael García Bernal, Anna Baryshnikov, Ajay Naidu, Rosa Salazar, Sam Jules, Daisy Tahan, Samrat Chakrabarti
Running Time: 97 minutes
Rating: R

★★★ ½ (out of ★★★★) 

If the goal of a teacher at all education levels is to help their students reach their fullest potential, just a nudge or push in the right direction can often let them know they're capable of more than they suspected. With the proper guidance, they can get there, and when it happens, this achievement accompanies a realization that the ability was actually in them along, and just needed some nurturing to reveal itself. In Netflix's disturbing and thought-provoking The Kindergarten Teacher, the title character lives and breathes to provide such inspiration for her students.

Under usual circumstances, this kind of devotion is admirable. What's not are the lines she's willing to cross to provide it, calling into question the very definition of the word "teacher," specifically when their involvement in students' lives starts to become about something other than the kids. Most would agree if there's a clear line, she jumps right over it, resulting in disastrous if not potentially dangerous consequences for those directly involved. It also has a lot to say about the pressures adults put on themselves and how easily they're capable of projecting them onto those least equipped to handle it.

Entrusted with a job requiring almost complete selflessness, she instead disappears into her own mind and insecurities, attempting to rectify her failures through an impressionable child. Using him to fill a seemingly unsatiable void in her life, it plays out like a horror movie with a situation that starts innocently, until escalating enough to where the tension reaches a boiling point.

While it becomes frighteningly apparent just how far this woman can go, we're still not quite sure the distance writer/director Sara Colangelo's script will, or how it can possibly resolve itself without manipulation. And yet it somehow does, in equally observant ways. Nothing that occurs couldn't happen, and it probably has, which only makes it that much more uncomfortable to watch. At its center is a revelatory lead performance from an accomplished but long underrated actress that's a subtle tightrope walk of emotions.

With two decades as an educator already behind her, New York-based kindergarten teacher Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gylenhaal) is merely going through the motions at home with husband, Grant (Michael Chernus), while barely trying to mask her dissapointment in unambitious teen children Lainie (Daisy Tahan) and Josh (Sam Jules). Determined to become a published poet, she takes night classes, only to find her work routinely picked apart and dismissed by both her peers and their instructor, Simon (Gael García Bernal). Creative salvation soon comes from one of her students, 5 year-old Jimmy Roy (Parker Sevak), a child prodigy who's capable of unexpectedly blurting out beautiful poems at will.

Looking to harness and mold Jimmy's untapped potential, Lisa makes him her personal project, rushing for a pen and paper whenever inspiration strikes and even going so far as to actually present his work as her own. The more she smothers him with attention the clearer it becomes that it isn't even really about him anymore. And in trying to "rescue" Jimmy from a passionless world she views as incapable of faciliatating his unique talent, her obsessive mentoring soon crosses into territory from which there's no turning back for either.

Open-hearted, quirky and achingly sincere, Lisa can't seem to comprehend how a child with so much to offer the world isn't being encouraged or intellectually stimulated in any way. But what Colangelo's script (which she based upon the 2014 Israeli film) is good at emphasizing is Lisa's slow-building inability to grasp the reality that this is still a five-year-old we're talking about. He's somewhat shy and withdrawn, but at the end of the day, he just wants to hang out with his friends and and play like all kids his age. It's when she becomes aggressively involved in his home life, making judgments about his frequently absent father (Samrat Chakrabarti) and even the babysitter (Rosa Salazar), that this may be about something else entirely.

Giving her best performance since Secretary, Gyllenhaal plays Lisa as disarmingly normal and competent when we first meet her. Her head may be a bit in the clouds, but we never doubt she's a good teacher, or at least was. It's only when the layers get peeled back with the introduction of this student that she slowly unravels, using him as a vessel to fix what she believes is her own failure of a life. In a memorable scene at home, her daughter even says as much right to her face.

More impressively, Gyllenhaal and young Parker Sevak's scenes manage to find that realistic sweet spot in an extremely disconcerting dynamic that will give all parents another reason to worry about sending their kids off to kindergarten. As Lisa's teacher, Gael García Bernal may not seem to have much of a role, but his character is important in that he's also being manipulated. That he only starts to take both a professional and personal interest in her when she assumes this new persona is further ammunition for Lisa to hate herself more, and double down on the deception. But he's no victim, guilty himself of abusing his position, proving to be in this for more than just the sake of art.      

It takes the characters in the script longer to figure out what's going on than we do, but in this case, that makes sense because it takes a while for Lisa to unravel. Only when Colangelo takes the premise and milks every last minute of queasy suspense from it, do Lisa's intentions and actions arrive at a destination that only in hindsight seems to be the most logical of resolutions. Trapped and with seeimgly no way out, she must come face-to-face with her actions, receiving punishment from the person most affected by them. That even in her lowest, most desperate point, this woman still can't help but teach might be the The Kindergarten Teacher's most powerful and pitifully sad moment. As the true magnitude of her actions settle in, it's a lesson learned too late, but perhaps just in time for those affected by what she's done.