With A Statement, Tom McCarthy completes a Hollywood trilogy of preachy, humorless, and unenlightening climate-change films that also includes Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger.
The story of a 1980 conference about the impacts of CO2 on the environment, the director’s latest—making its world premiere at the New York Film Festival—is a socially conscious drama (based on Nathaniel Richin’s book Losing Earth) in the vein of his Best Picture-winning Spotlight.
Unfortunately, by hewing closely to the record, it’s as dry and ineffective as its subject, and no amount of understandable despair—or a John Turturro performance that’s light years better than its every other element—can compensate for its staidness.
In St. Petersburg, Florida’s Don CeSar hotel, a giant establishment that looks like it’s housing the Backrooms in its basement, a collection of scientists, policymakers, and activists gather at the behest of the National Commission on Air Quality to confront rising CO2 levels and their potential deleterious effect on the planet.
Leading this group is Williams College professor Tom Jorling (Paul Rudd), who, along with his right-hand man Robert Cunningham (Noah Robbins), frets about table arrangement and, more pressingly, his ability to achieve the conference’s goal: a “consensus” statement—whatever that might eventually resemble—on the hot-button issue.
Spotlight is far from a visual knockout, but it’s practically Gone With the Wind compared to A Statement, whose formal approach is to cut between static head-on shots of the meeting’s participants as they bandy about opinions in search of common ground.
Of those attendees, the most important are Energy Department bigwig Dr. David Slade (Paul Giammati), nonprofit Friends of the Earth representative Rafe Pomerance (Evan Peters), lawyer Edith Brown Weiss (Tatiana Maslany), public health scholar Annemarie Crocetti (Amy Ryan), meteorologist John Perry (Jason Clarke), and M.I.T. nuclear engineer Dr. David Rose (Turturro), the last of whom sets the proceedings’ tone by delivering an overhead-projector presentation that practically bores his colleagues to tears.
Whether viewers are supposed to find Rose’s dullness amusing is debatable, largely because A Statement is, at almost every juncture, drearily unfunny. Only Turturro comes close to being witty, embodying his expert as a formidable, curt, and borderline-rude intellect who’s equally comfortable telling everyone that he doubts humanity’s willingness to evade disaster and crashing a hotel wedding where he goofily gets down on the dance floor.
On the heels of his Oscar-worthy turn in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, it’s a reminder of his idiosyncratic greatness, which is all the more evident given how poorly his castmates fare at enlivening their own stock parts.
A Statement opens by overlaying written transcripts of the meeting onto the action to show that its script is often a verbatim translation. That level of veracity, however, means that the film is a series of academic conversations about the topic, most of which send the get-together’s four sessions spinning in circles rather than speeding toward an agreed-upon report. Amid the tedium, the main source of humor is Peters’ Pomerance, a scruffy, loudmouthed environmentalist whom Jorling spends most of his time trying to keep from blowing things up with his doomsday-ish calls for policy changes.
There isn’t an unlikeable actor in A Statement, but McCarthy gives them little to work with except dialogue that’s routinely fixated on semantics; this is a climate change film for people eager to see professionals discuss whether to use “reduce,” “minimize,” or “control” in their declaration.
While quarrels over language reflect these participants’ varying positions and the painful difficulty of making climate progress, they’re deadly from a dramatic standpoint, especially since no aspect of the multifaceted problem is addressed beyond a brief mention.
Slade argues they’re taking a U.S.-centric approach to a global dilemma, Pomerance counters that the country must set a shining example for the rest of the world to follow, and Perry routinely chimes in with comments that make clear he’s uninterested in doing much to improve the situation. Clarke’s smugly smiling routine is a familiar one for the actor, and McCarthy gives him scant chances to infuse it with genuine personality; he’s just the biggest baddie in a room torn between denial, fury, fear, and resignation.
In-between sessions, these men and women eat buffet lunches, call relatives at home, and—in the case of Rose, Cunningham, and emotionally detached stenographer Bernadette (Nina Arianda)—attend nuptials to which they were not invited. Yet none of these asides deepen the characters nor speak in any pressing way to the larger crisis at hand. They’re merely padding for a tale that’s predictably headed toward minor compromises and passionate pleas to transcend disagreements or, in the case of Ryan’s Crocetti, to recognize that they’re on the same page when it comes to the vital importance of climate change and must say so in order to guarantee that the fight is continued after this summit is concluded.
A Statement is well-intentioned, presenting an across-the-board view of the obstacles that, for decades, have stymied a meaningful evolution of our fossil fuel-based infrastructure and economy. Yet the 1980 conference it recreates serves as a cursory compendium of talking points that it doesn’t properly elaborate on or investigate in an informative or captivating way.
Yes, profits are a factor in this conversation, as are developing nations’ priorities, projections about the specific time frame for calamity to strike, and the sheer magnitude of transitioning from one energy source to another. McCarthy, however, fails to make such matters compelling, instead resorting to monotonous back-and-forths that summarize rather than elucidate.
Even-handed as it pretends to be, A Statement clearly believes in the necessity of this gathering and, with it, action, but bias isn’t its weakness; lifelessness is. Before it’s all over, one character will stare out at the vast ocean, their feet in the surf, as they cry tears of hopelessness and terror over the fact that we—as Americans, and humans—seem incapable of transcending our differences, prejudices, and selfish interests to achieve a greater good.
In light of the preceding torpor, this in-your-face mawkishness is almost welcome. Nonetheless, no amount of last-second heartstring-tugging can salvage this Wikipedia page masquerading as a movie.
