Law in Culture Review 

Jessica Fajardo 

“Worth” is a 2020 movie. It stars Michael Keaton, Stanley Tucci, and Amy Ryan. It is directed by Sara Colaneglo and written by Max Borenstein.  It is available on Netflix. It is based on the true story of the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund and the attorney in charge of it.  

The movie tells the story of a lawyer named Ken Fienberg who deals with wrongful death settlements and who also teaches at a law school. Soon after the movie starts, 9/11 happens and the government sets up a fund for the victims called the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund. It is designed to provide “tort style compensation” for the families of the deceased and for anyone who was injured or became ill due to the 9/11 attacks.  

Fienberg asks for the job of special master for the fund and works pro bono. It is he and his firm’s duty to persuade at least 80% of the victims to accept compensation through the fund, which would also mean they forfeit their right to a lawsuit. The firm also decides how much money each decedents’ family will get. The fund will only work if they reach 80% participation. However, many of the families feel that the language of the fund, and the formula they use to come up with a number for each victim, to be insensitive and unjust. The formula would give high earners like CEOs more money than say, a janitor who worked in the same building and perished the same way. However, the families of the high earners feel they are entitled to the most money, since the potential for income was higher for them than for that of a worker with a lesser income.  

A man named Charles Wolf, whose wife died on 9/11, is critical of the fund and the formula. Most of the victim’s families agree with him and refuse to sign up for the fund. He even has a website called Fixthefund.com. He urges Ken to see each case as it’s own story, with it’s own value, rather than numbers on a spreadsheet.

Keith and his team have hard time getting the families to accept being part of the fund. The families don’t trust them. They are in grief and they are angry. 

Eventually they throw out the formula and they meet with as many families as possible to try to get fair compensation for everyone. 

Concepts 

The legal concepts addressed in the movie were monetary settlements for wrongful death, or damages, the need for this fund to have enough claimants to function, and the rights of the families to sue for damages, and class action lawsuits.  

The idea was that if all the families sued, the economy would have been deeply and negatively affected. The airlines would have gone out of business, and the families could have been in court litigation for several years, if not decades. For this reason, they needed to persuade 80% of the victims to join the fund. If they didn’t meet that minimum, the families would have had the right to sue for damages.  

Ken and his firm believe compensation is the family’s best bet at moving forward from this tragedy. However, some people felt that it was a way of “throwing money at their graves.”  

My reaction 

After doing some additional reading, I think the film portrayed the story accurately. In real life, the lawyer had a formula he followed for determining a person’s worth which created tension, and he was seen as being unfair. But then they started to talk to the families and hear their stories and they threw the formula out the window and raised the base compensation.  

I would recommend this movie because it shows you another side of the 9/11 aftermath that you don’t hear about.  

In the end there is a blurb about Ken being involved in other victim compensation funds like the Sandy Hook Community Fund, the Virginia Tech fund and many others. I would be interested in learning more about these other funds. Of course, nothing can bring back a loved one, but compensation can serve as a form of accountability or at least acknowledgement of harm, which might be the only justice a family can get.

I think it did make me more interested in the legal field and specifically, compensation for wrongful deaths or tragedies like this. You cannot exactly right a wrong when it comes to life and death, but you can try to hold someone accountable, and this will ease the burden of the ones who were affected by a harmful act. Sometimes there may not be a person you can send to jail for the wrong that has been done. Sometimes money may be the only way to get compensation for what you have been through. This is not to say that you can put a dollar amount on a person’s worth or life or that you can reduce someone’s pain to a dollar amount. But monetary compensation might help you suffer less.  

The movie was a good introduction to this topic and I think I will end up reading the attorney’s book when I have more time. I think it inspires me to think of other people who are suffering a tragedy and what kind of compensation they might be entitled to. For example, the migrants whose children were taken from them and put in cages. I wonder what kind of case they could have against the government for this harmful and damaging act.

Thank you.