CineWomen: Sara Colangelo examines ‘Worth’ in big and ‘Little Accidents’
Plus ‘The Mad Women’s Ball’ directed by Mélanie Laurent and ‘Real Women Have Curves’ directed by Patricia Cardoso
My local movie theater was one of the cinemas that didn’t reopen when California lifted pandemic restrictions earlier this year. AMC ended up taking it over, and it’s probably sacrilege to say this, but I’m glad. I hadn’t been going to The Grove regularly outside of screenings in awhile, and even those had tapered off. The AMC in Century City had become my go-to theater instead for one simple reason: AMC Stubs A-List.
Motivated — or forced — by the popularity of the now-defunct MoviePass to offer a subscription, AMC and other major exhibitors offered their own version. So now, for $24 a month, I can go to up to three movies per week. If I see only two movies a month, the thing more than pays for itself. Plus with every monthly payment I earn points toward $5 rewards that show up in my app, so every once in a while I get free popcorn too.
Look, this isn’t new. What is new — for me, anyway — is having essentially free movies in a flagship cinema within walking distance. It feels incredibly indulgent to wrap up work or a meeting and decide, spur of the moment, to catch a flick without having to get in the car.
It’s not perfect. The subtitles in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings were cut off at the bottom of the screen. And AMC gets some smaller films but not all, so I anticipate having to get in the car to drive across town and — gasp! — pay to see anything more obscure than Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch.
But for a spontaneous afternoon matinee? I’ll take it.
‘Worth’
On the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, director Sara Colangelo revisits not that traumatic day — though it does make an appearance in a way that many, even New Yorkers, experienced it: a sudden collective awareness, a puff of smoke on the horizon. Rather than revisit that infamous morning, however, Colangelo explores the aftermath, when the United States government — in a gesture of sympathy to victims and their families, yes, but also profound cynicism to prevent crippling lawsuits against the airlines — established the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.
Based on true events, Worth centers on attorney Kenneth Feinberg (Michael Keaton), who specializes in this sort of thing — arbitrating cases having to do with Agent Orange, asbestos and the like. His fundamental belief that objectivity yields fairness is uniquely unsuited for this particular case, however, with thousands of grieving families who want more than anything, even money, for their loved ones to be remembered and their stories to be heard.
At once brilliant and charismatic, arrogant and cold, Feinberg gets the benefit of the doubt thanks to the casting of Keaton, who, sporting a gravelly Boston accent, finds the humor, sensitivity, and room for growth in the character.
Money, of course, does play into it, with Feinberg and his team, including his partner Camille Biros (Amy Ryan), calculating the value of the lives lost, from CEOs to janitors, firefighters to bystanders — in other words, their worth. While the amount the program offers some is welcomed as a windfall, others — inevitably those offered the most — demand more. Meanwhile, what to do about the partner of a gay man whose estranged parents are considerd next of kin? Or a mistress and her child?
The biggest thorn in Feinberg’s side is Charles Wolf (Stanley Tucci), a widower who from the start takes issue with the fund’s formula. Wolf is no villain to Feinberg’s awkward hero but rather a worthy foil. In interactions that are enviously civil, Colangelo amps up the tension by pushing the characters to the edge of the frame, where they address their adversary lying just off screen.
Penned by Max Borenstein (the recent Godzilla and Kong movies), Worth is built like a procedural, detailing how the formula is determined and lists of victims compiled. With a goal for participation and deadline ratcheting up tension despite being nearly two years away, eventually victory is triumphantly conveyed by a stat on a whiteboard. The script beats back all this rationality — and rationalizations — with montages of testimonials, layering grief upon grief upon grief until finally the need for empathy breaks through. This is when Feinberg and his team start to see real progress in making the fund a success.
Though it’s unlikely that Feinberg’s personal growth was tied so neatly to how the dispensation actually played out, thematically this development can’t help but reflect on the current political climate, where civility seems impossible in even the most benign disagreements, and which could learn too a thing or two about leading with empathy.
Worth (2021), directed by Sara Colangelo (Netflix)
‘Little Accidents’
Writer-director Sara Colangelo has been excavating this idea of collective tragedy since the outset of her career, basing her feature debut Little Accidents on her NYU thesis short of the same name. Here, a mining accident in a small American town has split the community between families who lost loved ones — but gained a modest payout — and households who fear an investigation into the incident will close down the source of so many of their livelihoods.
At the center of the controversy is shy Amos Jenkins (sensitively portrayed by Boyd Holbrook), the only survivor of the accident who wants more than anything to just go back to work.
Against this backdrop, a teenage boy goes missing who happens to be the son of Bill Doyle (Josh Lucas), one of the mine executives of particular interest in the case, and his homemaker wife Diana (Elizabeth Banks), who in her grief pursues an unlikely relationship with Amos.
And tied up in all of this is a kid named Owen (Jacob Lofland, bringing uncanny Julianne Nicholson energy to the role) with a dead dad, mourning mom (Chloë Sevigny), special-needs brother (Beau Wright) and a terrible secret.
It’s hard to get behind the affair that develops between Amos and Diana, and Banks is unusually unconvincing in her expressions of grief. But Owen’s emotional journey, captured with intimate handheld camerawork, is poignantly nuanced, and his inevitable intersection with Amos is executed with delicate grace.
Little Accidents (2014), directed by Sara Colangelo (DVD)
‘The Mad Women’s Ball’
Something seemed familiar about Mélanie Laurent’s The Mad Women’s Ball, about a late-nineteenth-century young society woman who finds herself institutionalized at Paris’s famed Salpêtrière Hospital. Impossibly beautiful with porcelain skin, sapphire eyes, and ruby lips, Eugénie Cléry (Lou de Laâge) is a familiar character: smarter than her brother, who’s nevertheless favored with more freedom and opportunities, and a bit of a smart aleck because of it.
She also sees ghosts, which manifests to those around her — and, interestingly, the audience — as fits. Although the viewer too is shut out of her paranormal experience, these scenes still play as subjective thanks to de Laâge’s enthralling reaction.
Eugénie isn’t hurting anyone, yet still her father drops her off at the hospital, where her protestations are met only with diagnoses that ensure her stay. There, she meets and befriends fellow patients: the mad, the epilepctic, the physically and mentally ill, and — in a bit of deja vu — the hysterical. For one of Eugénie’s bunkmates is a woman named Louise (Lomane de Dietrich) whom their doctor, one Dr. Charcot (Grégoire Bonnet), hypnotizes to demonstrate her symptoms of seizures and eventually contortions for a crowd. Louise as in Louise Augustine Gleizes or “Augustine,” the subject of her own drama by another French female filmmaker reviewed on CineWomen.
Whereas that film centers on the historical kitchen maid who made Dr. Charcot famous, The Mad Women’s Ball instead uses a fictional woman of privilege to tell a similar story, though here the points of view of the doctor and his ilk are sidelined for that of the women under his care as well as the women caring for them, including Geneviève Gleizes (Laurent), the head nurse who has reason to believe Eugénie’s claims of being able to access the spirit world. Theirs is a story of degrees of powerlessness and the lengths to which they’ll go to gain freedom — physical or emotional.
The Mad Women’s Ball (2021), directed by Mélanie Laurent (Amazon)
‘Real Women Have Curves’
When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opens this month, featured prominently, between Citizen Kane and Martin Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker, is Real Women Have Curves, director Patricia Cardoso’s indie darling starring America Ferrera in her very first role. Coming up on its twentieth anniversary, the movie was perhaps ahead of its time with its authentic, at times very funny portrayal of a Latinx family in a Los Angeles little seen on the big screen, and body-positive messaging right in the title.
High school graduate Ana Garcia (Ferrera) is smart — or at least we’re told she is — but still has no plans to go to college, and resents having to work in her sister’s dress shop instead. She’s a little bit of a brat about it, if we’re being honest, but still wins our sympathy because her ridiculous mother Carmen (an egoless Lupe Ontiveros), who claims she’s pregnant but is probably going through menopause, won’t get off Ana’s case about her weight.
When Ana strips off her shirt in the heat of the factory, and gets the other women to do the same, what becomes a moment of triumph and pride in what their bodies are capable of and have been through lays bare Carmen’s own trauma and shame.
Despite a fairy tale ending that grossly misrepresents how the college application and acceptance process works, Real Women Have Curves is an inspirational anthem for real women everywhere.
Real Women Have Curves (2002), directed by Patricia Cardoso (HBO Max)
