By Derek Horne
The Fight [pictured above] is a documentary about ACLU lawyers defending human rights in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, and Worth is a narrative feature based on the true story of a lawyer fighting to get compensation for the victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks.
In Worth, Michael Keaton portrays Ken Feinberg, whose law firm is tasked by Congress to handle the $7 billion Victim Compensation Fund. At the beginning of the film, Feinberg, who teaches law at Georgetown University, asks his students what a life is worth. Then later in the film, at a town hall meeting with family members of the September 11th victims, he explains the formula for determining the compensation amount based on the deceased victim’s salary and lost income. The glaring disparities of the monetary differences enrage the crowd, including the community activist Charles Wolf (played by Stanley Tucci) who starts a protest movement called “Fix the Fund.” The film sensitively portrays the emotional transformation that Feinberg and his associates experience as they come to terms with the actual human tragedies behind the dollar amounts. Sara Colangelo (whose past two feature films at Sundance included Little Accidents and The Kindergarten Teacher) does a graceful job directing the story and gleaning strong performances from the cast.
The Fight spotlights the courageous lawyers who work for the American Civil Liberties Union (A.C.L.U.), whose jobs just got a lot harder since Donald Trump took office. The film focuses on four of the 144 civil rights lawsuits that have come up as a direct result of the Trump administration’s hard-line policies. Among these high-profile cases are the immigrant family separation policies, restricting access to abortions, the transgender military ban, and the citizenship question being added to the census surveys (which would expose illegal immigrants.)
The film’s scattershot approach evens out once the main players are all introduced and the high stakes of their cases are explained, offering quite a bit of suspense and some twists and turns for viewers who are not already familiar with the outcomes. (For maximum enjoyment, don’t read Wikipedia before you see this film.) In addition to the legal battles, the film shows the other A.C.L.U. struggles from threatening phone calls and hate mail to getting blamed for their involvement in protecting the 1st Amendment rights of White Supremacists who organised the “Unite the Right” rally which resulted in the death of a protester. As their national legal director David Cole explains, the A.C.L.U. protects the rights of all people, not just the rights of people you agree with.
Needless to say, Donald Trump did not show up at Sundance for a Q&A after The Fight. However, the other 2016 U.S. Presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton did show up for the premiere of Hillary, an original docuseries about her life which will premiere on Hulu in the Spring. She participated in a Q&A after the screening, which inevitably included the topic of President Donald Trump’s impeachment.
