If you see only one movie this year about a super-geek task force of scientists, academics, lawyers, activists, and bureaucrats who meet in a hotel conference room in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1980 to draft a manifesto about climate change, make that movie “A Statement” (at least, until a better movie comes along). The conference I described actually happened. This was a mission overseen by the US Congress. The issue of global warming was on the map, and the committee, which gathered in Florida for three days of meetings over the weekend, was asked to draft a mission statement that would assess the threats of climate change and make recommendations to Congress on exactly what should be done about it.
“A Statement” was directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy, the strongman behind “Spotlight” and “Stillwater,” and features some great actors, like Paul Rudd, who plays a very diplomatic conference moderator, and Paul Giamatti, who plays a flamboyant Department of Energy official, and John Turturro, who is extremely elegant and funny as a nuclear science professor at MIT, and Amy Ryan is the quiet activist who eventually emerges as the conscience of the group.
As you might have guessed, this film is not a story of high-speed helicopter chases and daring heists. The conference – 20 men and women preaching, debating, strategizing, exposing the truth – is the entire movie. “A Statement” is a film ConversationSo let me put my bias out there: I’m entirely in favor of movies about conversation — humanistic legal showdowns like “12 Angry Men” (one of the greatest movies of all time), or dinner-table dialogue like “My Dinner with Andre,” or “Before Sunrise” and its sequels, or the films of Eric Rohmer. I’m the one who really thinks about that thing Is Action (just ask any of my friends). And I like hearing intelligent debate on issues, which makes me the target audience for a movie like “A Statement.”
That said, I watched the film with seriously divided emotions. On paper, “A Statement” sounds like an interesting movie, but it’s talky and flat, charming and twisted, sentimental and neutral all at the same time. It wants to be a “firebrand” docudrama, yet I can’t imagine who its audience will be. My heartless prediction: second to none. Not because the movie is bad, but because it’s like an endless magazine article in movie form.
McCarthy and his co-screenwriters, Thomas Bideigny and Noah Debré, decided not to “dramatize” the conference. Instead, he dug up the conversations from the actual transcripts and presented them verbatim, which is a bold choice on some levels. And McCarthy is certainly a skilled enough filmmaker to achieve the effect he was going for. In “A Statement”, he captures the sound and rhythm, the verbal circle-spinning, foggy-tangled essence of that thing known as A. strategic planning meeting.
For anyone, in any profession, who has attended such a meeting (that is, just about anyone who has ever worked for a corporation or government or any school system, or anyone who has ever belonged to a guild or union), that accomplishment may come as a mixed blessing. Because the not-so-dirty secret of this kind of meeting is that it can, at its best, get the job done, the truth is that sitting there and listening to the endless arguing and jostling for position, the grinding of heels and then compromises, the testy but somehow bland infighting – all of it can be enough to force you to curl up into a ball. In “A Statement”, what we’re really seeing is the quintessence of a certain kind of middle-class American entropy.
To be fair, the mild charm of “A Statement” is that we’re looking back to the 1980s, seeing what people said and thought about climate change in that very different era. You can expect it all to feel well behind the curve. But the disturbing surprise of “A Statement” is that there is no “aha” in it, if only they knew then what we know now! Factor. The film is based, in part, on “Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change,” a 2019 book by Nathaniel Rich about the 1980s, and the central thesis of the book is that we knew it all then — or, at least, that’s what the most knowledgeable people knew.
In the beginning, Turturro’s character, Dr. David Rose, uses an overhead projector to present five slides he has prepared. They display graphs that chart where carbon dioxide levels are going and project how much damage will be caused to the environment. The facts are all clear (even if there is some minor debate about them): the threat to the ozone layer, the incipient danger of fossil fuels, the timetable for where all this is headed.
Most of us didn’t start hearing about global warming until much later in the decade (Bill McKibben’s game-changing New York Review of Books article “Is the World Getting Hotter?” appeared in 1988), and the idea that such a disparate group was totally onto it is news. So what are the people in the room arguing about? i really want them to argue More. There is a lot of hair-splitting going on, and given that the nature of climate change is that it requires speculation, there is a fundamental disagreement about how they should conceptualize the future threat. Should they say “Here’s what’s going to happen” or “Here’s what’s going to happen.” can (That’s a worthy conversation.) There are committee members who are protecting their turf, who don’t want to offend the powers that be. (They include Jason Clarke as a colorful corrupt jerk.) But what we learn is that when it comes to actual ideas, the voices on display aren’t actually so far apart.
The two most colorful characters are Turturro’s sycophantic professor and Rafe Pomerance, president of Friends of the Earth. Pomerance was one of the first environmental activists to speak out on climate change, and Evan Peters, in beard and long hair, plays him as an angry establishment hippie who’s very enthusiastic about what he knows. During meetings, he bides his time before speaking his mind, but his attitude is that the time for delay is already gone – the committee must advise Congress as boldly as possible.
It’s clear, at least to most of us, that he is right: They should sound the alarm. Tell Congress how serious the situation is (or will be if failure to act). But even if committee members succeed in doing so (spoiler alert: they don’t), here’s a question: How should they advise Congress to act? what exactly, should be done?
At the beginning, there’s a moment that reveals what the real debate is (or should be). When Rafe, the token counterculture tree-hugger, is first introduced to the Professor and learns that he is a nuclear scientist, he mocks him, calling him the “Big Bad Wolf”. The professor laughed it off. This is back in the era when simple use of the word “nuclear” could make it seem like a dirty word. But, in reality, the professor is the only one who really understands what’s going on. Decades ahead of his time, he made it clear that renewable energy – at that time, primarily solar energy – wasn’t going to cut it. There is no way they can begin to replace fossil fuels. What else? They still can’t. If you want to stand up to the oil industry, only one source of energy that exists today has the potential to get us off fossil fuels, and that is nuclear energy. And the professor immediately comes out and says. (Don’t believe that? Watch the powerful Robert Stone documentary “Pandora’s Promise” or Oliver Stone’s “Nuclear Now.”)
But the professor is overruled – by Rafe, and also by an official lawyer (Tatiana Maslany), who is allergic to the word “nuclear”. I was thrilled to see this topic in “A Statement.” Yet it is dropped just as quickly as it is picked up, and that begs the question: what is this movie really about? When you get to the surprising ending, the message seems to be that when it comes to climate change, we have become a society that is much like Hamlet – able to talk, unable to act. And this is worth saying.
But in a strange way, “A Statement” is an example of that same syndrome. At its modest-budget indie level, this is another movie like “Digger,” which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with members of the Hollywood community. notation Their concern. But if they’re really so concerned, why don’t they put aside the familiar talking points about climate change – the hand-wringing and the hectoring – and do something that’s really outside the box? “A Statement” captures a moment in time, and gives you an interesting window into how much was known at the time. Yet as a drama, the film is a bit like Greenhouse Gases. It leaves you stuck in a place where imagining solutions is not bold enough.