The Mesmerizing A Statement Hits Like a Brick to the Head

Tom McCarthy’s A Statement isn’t a hard film to describe, but it is a hard film to describe effectively. Premiering at the New York Film Festival, the movie is based on a real two-day conference about climate change that happened in 1980 and was later recounted in Nathaniel Rich’s 2019 nonfiction book Losing Earth. At the event, 20 experts from a variety of disciplines crowded into a room in a Fort Lauderdale hotel and tried to address the growing concern of rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere. McCarthy and his co-screenwriters, Noé Debré and Thomas Bidegain, have adhered closely to the actual transcripts of the conference in their efforts to recreate it. Contrary to conventional wisdom, “people talking in rooms” is not an inherently uncinematic idea, and history is full of excellent work in that subgenre, be it 12 Angry Men, My Dinner With Andre, The Wannsee Conference, or Peter Hujar’s Day. But McCarthy’s challenge is slightly different from those other films. These are scientists, academics, and bureaucrats speaking with their own distinct terminology and often talking past one another. The subject is not a murder trial but the slow-moving murder of our planet and human civilization by us. How does one convey the urgency of such a situation when so much of the evidence is dense, and the chatter around it so impenetrable? In a way, it reflects the challenge of climate activism itself, especially as it was in 1980, when so much of the data still seemed unclear to lay eyes.

What a relief then that A Statement is mesmerizing, in part because McCarthy is willing to take some risks early on by allowing some confusion to sneak in. When the tense, aloof Dr. David Rose (John Turturro), a professor of nuclear engineering at MIT, stands up and gives a presentation about rising carbon levels filled with impenetrable jargon and indecipherable graphs, we might begin to wonder what we’ve walked into. But the disorientation is intentional; most of the participants in the room don’t understand what he’s saying either. By sticking to the transcripts, McCarthy recreates a dialogue that was never meant to be heard by ordinary ears. At the same time, his reverence for the text creates a certain classical constraint. At a Q&A after one screening, the director likened the material to Shakespeare, where one must adhere to what’s on the page, and the text is the text. By casting expressive performers, he allows them to fill in the blanks through their movements, their glances, their cadences. This is the kind of ensemble work they should teach in acting classes.

McCarthy does take some liberties by occasionally stepping away from the conference sessions to show us the participants in a more relaxed mode, speaking off the cuff, sometimes even arguing in more direct fashion. Two of the more oppositional individuals, Department of Energy official David Slade (Paul Giamatti) and environmental activist Rafe Pomerance (Evan Peters), get together one night to try and iron out their differences — a possibly fictional scenario McCarthy says he thought up after seeing the two go from arguing bitterly in one session of the conference to surprisingly docile agreement the next. National Council on Air Pollution representative Annemarie Crocetti (an astoundingly good Amy Ryan) admits on the phone to her husband that she feels out of her element amid such bigwig scientists. Elsewhere, Rose, alongside scientist Robert Cunningham (Noah Robbins) and the conference stenographer (Nina Arianda), crashes a boisterous wedding taking place at the hotel. That feels at first like a wild digression from the issue at hand, but it eventually becomes a sad symbol of our inability to really care for the future. Rose reflects that the wedding is there for the parents to celebrate their children, but do people really care enough about the future of their children, or their children’s children, to do what needs to be done? Does such a question even have an answer? As the film makes clear, even these well-intentioned, highly knowledgeable individuals found themselves at an impasse when it came to a simple declaration of concern. “There are some days when I wish I didn’t know what I know,” Pomerance says. The people who don’t know, after all, are the happy ones. 

I don’t think I’m giving anything away by revealing that this 1980 conference did absolutely nothing to stop or slow climate change. And yet, A Statement, for all its well-founded despair, also manages to be an extremely entertaining movie. These two ideas are not irreconcilable, nor are they disconnected. McCarthy already demonstrated his affection for stories of professionalism and process with Spotlight (one of the more underrated Best Picture Oscar winners of recent years), and his background in comedy has served him well in past films like The Station Agent and Win Win. He understands how to take something that seems dry and procedural on the surface and imbue it with just enough warmth and humor to keep us watching and caring, but not so much that the story veers into abject sentimentality. And so, A Statement sneaks up on us. Its little narrative nips and tucks, its simple additions to the existing record, its notes of humanity draw us into these people’s worlds, their objectives, and their frustrations. By the end, their failure hits us like a brick to the head.

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