In late October 1980, days before the election of Ronald Reagan, Congress summoned 20 experts in various fields to a beachfront hotel in Florida. Their mandate was simple: figure out how to address the dire threat posed to the climate by fossil fuel emissions, then deliver their recommendations to Congress in the form of a statement.
Every word said during four marathon sessions over the next 36 hours – every disagreement or digression, tirade or truce – was recorded by a stenographer for posterity into a single document, hundreds of pages long, that stands as an artifact from a time when expertise was trusted, before corporate greed and political expediency mired “debate” about rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere in a haze of misinformation and inaction. The fact that this meeting took place at all – that experts in climate, energy, law, philosophy, politics and more agreed on the fundamental facts, yet struggled to reach consensus on what to do about them – is fascinating, if perhaps not the most natural fit for a movie. This was, after all, a conference room of specialists sharing evidence via overhead projector.
Nevertheless, A Statement, a new film from Spotlight director Tom McCarthy that dramatizes the landmark conference, bets on the inherent sparks of watching fractious personalities forced together, as outlined in a 10-page section within Nathaniel Rich’s 2019 book Losing Earth. McCarthy and fellow screenwriters Noé Debré and Thomas Bidegain have embarked on an admirable act of faith: every word said within the conference room walls – roughly half of the movie – is pulled verbatim from the stenographer’s document. That is no mere fun fact within the press notes; though occasional text overlays from the actual transcript suggest some level of verisimilitude, it is in fact helpful to one’s appreciation of the movie, which dives headlong into the weeds and spins out in circular debates, to know that every tedious discussion of semantics, every frustrating spiral of potentials, was not in fact a writerly decision, but a real event – the natural and instructive result of 20 individual humans, each with their own personal feelings and professional responsibilities, confronting an existential problem of global scale.
McCarthy, of course, is the writer/director of one of the great so-called competency porn movies of our time; the thrill of Spotlight is in both the successful reveal of a corrupted institution, and the frisson of watching people be unflappably good at their jobs. A Statement puts a misty-eyed spin on that pleasure: its people may be failing their objective – it’s a 46-year-old spoiler to say that no consensus was ever reached, nor a statement ever issued – but they’re at least trying their best, generally respecting each other’s views and, in the speculative bits outside the conference room that thankfully make the movie a treatise on the interminable condition of being human, actually befriending and learning from each other. If there is competency porn to be found, it is in McCarthy’s proficient, no-frills filmmaking, gracefully condensing 36 hours of collective tedium and personal reckonings into a tight 104 minutes.
That, as well as a stacked cast of character actors demonstrating their mastery of type. Paul Rudd is awkwardly charming as the conference moderator who just wants everyone to get along. Paul Giamatti is never less than commanding as the curmudgeonly stick-in-the-mud from the Department of Energy with wisdom to spare, should you wait for it. John Turturro provides comic relief as an endearingly serious oddball scientist who has stared down the void. Evan Peters, playing “the Paul Revere of climate change”, can still do boyish live wire while pushing 40, as the film’s moral conscience. Tatiana Maslany disappears so fully into her role as a law professor, nervously holding the room hostage in legalese, that I did not clock her until the credits. The film’s ensemble – including Amy Ryan, Silicon Valley’s Zach Woods and Somebody Somewhere’s Mary Catherine Garrison, among others – are uniformly excellent and calibrated, no one performer running away with things (though Giamatti, perhaps unsurprisingly, has the best go at it, in a fictionalized nighttime scene that satisfyingly pits his hardbitten pragmatism against Peters’s fiery idealism).
That is the gristle of the work, the difficult collaborations required to even have a shot of getting out of our human-made bind. For all its commendable historical accuracy – and there is a thrill in seeing, exactly, how we once thought about modernity’s most pressing and intractable problem – it’s the additional stuff, the late nights and vulnerable phone calls, dishy drinks and bruised egos, that makes A Statement a much more effective film about climate change than, say, a smug satire like Don’t Look Up. If we’ve learned anything in the decades since that beachside conference, it’s that the science can say what it will, but emotion will rule the day. The conference may have been a failure, but there is a satisfaction in watching them naively try.
A Statement is playing at the New York film festival with a US release later this year and UK and Australian releases to be announced
