‘A Statement’ Review: A Top Ensemble Including Paul Rudd, Amy Ryan and John Turturro Breathes Surprising Vitality Into Dry Docu-Drama

To borrow the title of a vintage Supertramp album that predates the events of this movie by five years: “Crisis? What crisis?” In truth, that’s the attitude of a tiny minority gathered in a Florida hotel conference room for 36 hours in 1980 in Tom McCarthy’s engrossing verbatim drama, A Statement. But it reflects the frustrating stalemate at which the group of 20 scientists, environmental activists, bureaucrats, academics and policymakers arrive after a marathon session of back-and-forth on climate change. And it typifies where we still are today as global CO2 emissions continue to hit record highs despite growing clean energy adoption.

Echoing the methodical approach he applied to investigative journalism in Spotlight, writer-director McCarthy brings exacting attention to long stretches of wonkish process and debate, somehow making the talkathon dramatically and visually dynamic. But the film’s biggest asset is its excellent and uncommonly egalitarian ensemble cast, each of them given moments to shine in sharp characterizations.

A Statement

The Bottom Line Talky but stimulating and incisively acted.

Venue: New York Film Festival (Spotlight)
Release date: Friday, Dec. 4
Cast: Paul Rudd, Evan Peters, Amy Ryan, Paul Giamatti, John Turturro, Tatiana Maslany, Nina Arianda, Jason Clarke, Noah Robbins, Zach Woods, Mary Catherine Garrison, Michael Chernus, Dylan Baker
Director: Tom McCarthy
Screenwriters: Noé Debré, Thomas Bidegan, Tom McCarthy, adapted from Nathaniel Rich’s book Losing Earth: A Recent History
1 hour 51 minutes

No one is going to call A Statement an exciting movie; it doesn’t have the stirring emotional pull of another film set in a Florida hotel, Regina King’s One Night in Miami, which imagined a 1964 conversation about the Black struggle between Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Cassius Clay, as the boxer was still known at that time.

Unlike King’s film, which was adapted from a largely fictionalized play, McCarthy and his French co-writers Noé Debré and Thomas Bidegan took a brief chapter from Nathaniel Rich’s 2019 climate science book Losing Earth: A Recent History as their source, folding in word-for-word transcripts for sections set in the conference room of the Don CeSar Hotel, an imposing pink palace that sits on the beach in St. Petersberg. But A Statement might just as easily have been a stageplay; the mere fact of having the entire principal cast in one room for much of the time contributes to the theatrical feel.

McCarthy moves through the set-up with admirable economy, conveying in onscreen text that Congress, in response to reports about the effect on the climate of burning fossil fuels, assembled the group of experts with a mandate to write a statement on how best to address the problem. Or whether even to call it a problem. That turned out to be an insurmountable challenge, even if those present, after a day-and-a-half of discussion, debate and compromise, are closer to being on the same page — or at least willing to acknowledge the cause for concern.

Early on, one of the participants tells a joke about how many scentists it takes to change a lightbulb: “We don’t know for sure. We need to put more money into research.” That kind of hurdle applies equally to government, chiefly represented by David Slade (Paul Giamatti), the cynical director of the Energy Department’s Office of Carbon Dioxide Effects.

Slade is by no means alone in questioning the urgency to take action, given the uncertainties of the research; he hammers the view that America’s carbon emissions are small compared to those of other continents. But he indirectly points up the major difference that climate change was a nonpartisan issue 46 years ago, on the eve of Ronald Reagan being elected to his first term, when he observes, “Well, presidents come and go, but if there’s one thing we will always agree on, it’s science.” The presence of a rep from Exxon (Eli Bildner) anticipates the outsize influence the oil and gas industry would have on climate control.

While the cast is uniformly strong and clearly bouncing off one another like theater pros, inevitably there are standouts. In addition to Giamatti, they include Paul Rudd as conference moderator Tom Jorling, struggling to keep the conversation productive, to ensure that everyone is heard, and to steer the room toward a consensus statement. Evan Peters is punchy as Rafe Pomerance, a director of Friends of the Earth, simmering with anger that so few people share his alarm. John Turturro injects sly humor into MIT nuclear engineer Dr. David Rose, a superbrain who invokes the Egyptians as a civilization that failed to heed warning signs. And Jason Clarke is amusingly flippant as John Perry, a meteorologist turned government science authority.

Despite intimate knowledge of the projected patterns for global warming, Perry maintains that humanity will have roughly a century to adapt once definitive findings are released, blithely suggesting that the American population can be relocated to landlocked states. Theories like that prompt legal scholar Edith Brown Weiss (Tatiana Maslany) to comment during a break, “Why is there no agenda? It feels like the blind leading the annoying.”

The writing in the non-transcript scenes outside the conference room is expertly chiseled, far more so than McCarthy’s collaboration with Debré and Bidegan on 2021’s swiftly forgotten cross-cultural drama Stillwater.

The women in the room are very much a minority and both Edith and public health official Annemarie Crocetti (Amy Ryan) at various points are made to feel out of their depth. But both speak up forcefully as the discussion wears on. Ryan is electrifying when Annemarie cuts in just as time is running out on day two, urging everyone to consider the issue a human problem.

The other woman on hand is stenographer Bernadette (Nina Arianda), who becomes cozy during breaks with Robert Cunningham, a young atmospheric sciences expert played with nervy energy by a terrific Noah Robbins. When he asks Bernadette how she manages to remain detached while matters of such gravity are being discussed, the DC veteran calls it a professional necessity. But as she sits off to the side, catching every exchanged glance or nervous silence in the room, the arguments start to inch under her skin. This happens after a wonderful interlude during which Dr. Rose, Bernadette and Robert all crash a wedding downstairs in the hotel ballroom and she takes the perspectives of both men on board.

As is to be expected of a meeting that took place relatively early in the climate-science trajectory, discussions of renewables are inconclusive. Dr. Rose grows frustrated when the proposed wording focuses on solar and wind energy but excludes nuclear, with someone inevitably bringing up the Three Mile Island power plant accident the previous year. He seems as surprised as Edith when she speaks up in support of his pushback against the exclusion of nuclear energy.

Some will likely question the point of A Statement given that the movie ends in collective failure, with the group unable to formulate a statement. But as a microcosm for the ongoing conversation about global warming, it’s effectively sobering, enhanced immeasurably by Stuart Dryburgh’s nimble cinematography and Bryce Dessner’s appropriately pensive score. At any rate, as a reflection on the climate crisis, it has much more to say than Digger.