What price a life?
Insensitive and vulgar as that question seems — how can anybody put a monetary value on the loss of a loved one? — actuaries, lawyers and insurance companies routinely do so.
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| A chance meeting at an opera performance allows Ken Feinberg (Michael Keaton, left) and Charles Wolf (Stanley Tucci) to start bridging the divide that has found them judging the 9/11 compensation fund from strikingly different points of view. |
As Borenstein’s script quickly depicts, however, this Congressional act of apparent compassion was — to a great degree — surface gloss. The fund was attached to the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act, a $15 billion bailout bill passed just 10 days after the terrorist strikes. The “fund gesture” hoped to “encourage” the survivors of 9/11 victims not to sue the industry into oblivion, thereby — in the words of airline corporate doomsayers attending a key meeting with U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft (Victor Slezak) — preventing a “possible economic cataclysm.”
Feinberg (Michael Keaton) is introduced a few days earlier, as he demonstrates the legal nature of “worth” to a class of university students. He’s a number-cruncher and creature of pure pragmatism, believing to the core that any issue can be solved with carefully calculated equations, and that all individuals involved will behave rationally and respect the resulting “tort-style compensation” of such efforts.
Keaton is ideal for this role, his feral intensity and smirky condescension operating at full throttle. This master-of-the-universe aura notwithstanding, he certainly isn’t evil; he genuinely believes that he’s doing good, and that the best possible outcome can be achieved if everybody simply acknowledges that he knows best.
Such blunt expediency takes its toll; Feinberg relaxes, at the end of each day, by bathing himself in classic opera. We get a vague sense that his rough edges are softened by his wife, Dede (Talia Balsam); we also suspect that she doesn’t entirely agree with his attitude. But Borenstein’s script leaves their relationship badly under-developed.
Feinberg and his firm — his chief lieutenant is Camille Biros (Amy Ryan) — gained their lauded reputation as master mediators after chaperoning previous high-profile cases involving asbestos personal injury litigation, and Agent Orange product liability litigation. But those cases developed over the course of years, even decades, by which time emotions had cooled; on top of which, there never was a single “asbestos incident” that snuffed thousands of lives in a blinding flash: a distinction Feinberg fails to recognize.
As a result, when he gathers an initial few hundred victim survivors — mere months later — he treats the presentation just like the classroom lecture we witnessed earlier, expecting all participants to be uniformly impressed by his charts and graphs. He’s therefore genuinely baffled — Keaton’s expression radiates total confusion — when the attendees turn on him like a pack of snarling wolverines.
The group includes Charles Wolf (Stanley Tucci), a seasoned community organizer mourning the loss of his wife; he has arrived with pages of notes explaining why Feinberg’s approach is fatally flawed. Feinberg ignores him, of course.
“Fair is not the goal,” we’re told Feinberg (in)famously said, earlier in his career. “It’s finish and move on.” (That line is thrown back at him, during a key third-act moment.)
Tucci’s performance is sublime. Wolf is calm, civil and gracious: the epitome of a negotiator who recognizes the wisdom of reaching across the aisle to meet an opponent halfway. He’s nonetheless just as hurt and angry; carefully modulated anguish radiates from Tucci’s posture, and the overly measured manner of his speech.
As the story progresses, Wolf’s occasional talks with Feinberg becomes one of the film’s high points: the hyper-rational versus the sympathetically emotional, with both men initially just trying to understand where the hell the other guy is coming from.
Wolf understands — as Feinberg doesn’t — that each of these people is an individual, with unique feelings, concerns and desires. Most care less about the money, and more about ensuring some sort of legacy for their lost loved ones: that their stories be told, their memories revered.
At its core, then, this is a classic Hollywood scenario: a lawyer finding his conscience.
Feinberg, Biros and their team are told, early on, that at least 80 percent of the potential fund recipients must participate — thereby waiving their right to sue — by December 22, 2003. If that goal isn’t met, the litigation threat posed by those not signing still could cripple the American economy. At first blush, two years seems like more than enough time.
Not with Feinberg at the helm.
He remains completely oblivious to the raw pain and despair emanating from each “client,” having outsourced most in-person interviews to his staff, while he continues to tinker with charts, graphs and equations. Worse yet, he delegates the working-class “common folks” to said staff, while he jousts with venal corporate attorneys — typified by Tate Donovan’s teeth-grindingly sleazy Lee Quinn (enter the villain) — who argue that a deceased CEO’s family is entitled to compensation high enough to allow them to maintain the lavish lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed.
Our dismay at Feinberg’s behavior aside, these “common folk” interviews are the film’s secondary focal point. Borenstein clearly adapted their individual stories from actual transcripts, and these dozens of brief monologues are a showcase for the fleetingly glimpsed actors delivering them: powerful montages that pack an emotional gut-punch.
It finally becomes personal, for Feinberg and Biros, when each handles a special case. Feinberg is closing up for the day, everybody else having gone home, when firefighter’s widow Karen Donato (Laura Benanti) arrives, apologizing for being late for her appointment. Feinberg graciously — if clumsily — takes the meeting, and is overwhelmed by the woman’s pain and confusion; Colangelo coaxes persuasive work from Benanti.
Biros, in turn, meets Graham Morris (Andy Schneeflock, also excellent), a gay young man whose relationship was viewed as an abomination by his deceased lover’s parents. Since they live in Virginia, where laws about such things aren’t as progressive as in New York, they’ll claim the compensation and dismiss Graham from their minds.
Is this fair, he quietly pleads, while Biros dies a little inside.
Additional empathy is supplied by Shunori Ramanathan’s sensitively sculpted performance as (the fictional) Priya Khundi, a new addition to Feinberg’s team. She initially turned down this position, having instead been prepared to begin work at a firm in one of the Twin Towers. By scripted coincidence, it’s the same firm where Wolf’s wife worked, which makes Priya a bridge between the two men.
Unfortunately, these strong moments and performances cannot compensate for the increasingly contrived nature of Borenstein’s script. Feinberg’s first inept encounter with Karen Donato is ludicrous; it’s as if the man never took a deposition during his entire career. And although Donato’s character initially injects a welcome note of emotional balance, the degree to which her situation expands becomes the worst sort of purple melodrama.
Sidebar excursions to the coastal site where Feinberg’s lovely new home is being built — where he goes to stroll the sand and “think on things” — also begin to feel callously crass.
Even worse, though, is the increasingly contrived degree to which Keaton’s Feinberg remains stubbornly oblivious and tone-deaf as the many, many months pass. It becomes impossible to take him seriously, or to view him with any sympathy.
The actual Feinberg acknowledged, in his memoir, that he lamented having been disinterested and patronizing during the Fund’s early days, but his attitude changed rapidly, after exposure to the families’ grief.
Not so here. Colangelo and Borenstein keep this guy clueless and brutally, coldly aloof for much, much too long, until a lightning-swift epiphany that reeks of Hollywood artifice.
That’s a shame. From an historical vantage point, this is a fascinating, frustrating and heartbreaking saga that deserves to be told with far more intelligence and respect than are on evidence here.
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