‘A Statement’ Review: How Much We Knew About Climate Change in 1980

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 hash out a manifesto about climate change, make that movie “A Statement” (at least, until a better one comes along). The conference I described really did take place. It was a mission dreamed up by the U.S. Congress. The issue of global warming was on the map, and the committee, gathering in Florida over a weekend for three days of meetings, was asked to devise a mission statement that would assess the dangers of climate change and make recommendations to Congress as to what, exactly, should be done about it.

“A Statement” was directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy, the sturdy carpenter of “Spotlight” and “Stillwater,” and it features some fine actors, like Paul Rudd, who plays the very diplomatic conference moderator, and Paul Giamatti, who plays a spiky Department of Energy official, and John Turturro, disarmingly elegant and funny as a professor of nuclear science at M.I.T., and Amy Ryan, as the quiet functionary who ultimately emerges as the conscience of the group.

The movie, as you’ve likely gathered, is not a tale of high-speed helicopter chases and daredevil heists. The conference — 20 men and women pontificating, arguing, strategizing, hashing out the truth — is the entire movie. “A Statement” is a film about conversation, so let me put my own prejudice forward: I’m utterly in favor of movies about conversation — humanistic legal showdowns like “12 Angry Men” (one of the greatest movies ever made), or a dinner-table dialogue like “My Dinner with Andre,” or “Before Sunrise” and its sequels, or the films of Eric Rohmer. I’m someone who actually thinks that talk is action (just ask any of my friends). And I love hearing issues argued over intelligently, which makes me the target audience for a movie like “A Statement.”

That said, I watched the film with seriously divided feelings. On paper, “A Statement” sounds like an interesting movie, but it’s at once talky and flat, grabby and meandering, impassioned and neutral. It wants to be a “firebrand” docudrama, yet I can’t imagine who the audience is going to be for it. My heartless prediction: next to no one. Not because the film is bad, but because it’s like an endless magazine article in movie form.

McCarthy and his co-screenwriters, Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, decided not to “dramatize” the conference. Instead, they dug the dialogue right out of the actual transcripts, presenting the conversations verbatim, which is on some level a daring choice. And McCarthy is certainly a skilled enough filmmaker to get the effect he was going for. In “A Statement,” he catches the sound and rhythm, the verbal wheel-spinning, the fuddy-duddy quibbling essence of that thing known as a strategic planning meeting.

For anyone, in any profession, who has attended such a meeting (i.e., just about anyone who has ever worked for a corporation or the government or a school system, or anyone who’s ever belonged to a guild or a union), that achievement may come off as a mixed blessing. Because the not-so-dirty secret of this kind of meeting is that while it can, at its best, get things done, the truth is that sitting there and listening to the endless jawboning and jockeying for position, the heel-digging stands followed by wilting compromise, the testy yet somehow bland infighting — all of it can be enough to make you want to curl up into a ball. In “A Statement,” what we’re really watching is the quintessence of a certain kind of middle-class American entropy.

To be fair, the mild fascination of “A Statement” is that we’re eavesdropping on 1980, seeing what people said and thought about climate change in that very different era. You might expect it all to sound well behind the curve. But the disquieting surprise of “A Statement” is that there’s no “Ah, if only they knew then what we know now!” factor. The movie is based, in part, on “Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change,” Nathaniel Rich’s 2019 book about the 1980s, and the central thesis of the book is that we knew it all then — or, at least, the most knowledgeable people did.

Early on, the Turturro character, Dr. David Rose, uses an overhead projector to present five slides that he’s prepared. They display graphs that chart where the carbon dioxide levels are heading and project what the damage to the environment will be. The facts are all clear (even though there’s some minor quarreling about them): the threats to the ozone layer, the primal danger of fossil fuels, the timetable of where it’s all heading.

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 a disparate collective like this one was fully onto it is news. So what are the people in the room arguing about? I actually wish they argued more. There’s a lot of hair-splitting, and given that the very nature of climate change is that it requires speculation, there’s a fundamental disagreement about how they should conceptualize the threat to the future. Should they say “Here’s what’s going to happen” or “Here’s what could happen”? (That’s a worthy conversation.) There are committee members who are protecting their turf, not wanting to offend the powers that be. (They include Jason Clarke as a colorfully corrupt blowhard.) But part of what we pick up on is that when it comes to the actual ideas, the voices on display aren’t really so far apart.

The two most colorful characters are Turturro’s puckish professor and Rafe Pomerance, who’s the president of Friends of the Earth. Pomerance was one of the first environmental activists to speak out on climate change, and Evan Peters, in a beard and longish hair, plays him as a fuming establishment hippie, all hyped up on everything he knows. During the meeting, he bides his time before speaking his mind, but his attitude is that the time for delaying is already gone — that the committee should advise Congress as boldly as possible.

It’s clear, at least to most of us, that he’s right: They should be sounding the alarm. Let Congress know how dire the situation is (or will be, if there’s a failure to act). But even if the committee members succeed in doing that (spoiler alert: they don’t), here’s a question: How should they advise Congress to take action? What, eactly, should be done?

Early on, there’s a moment that foreshadows 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’s a nuclear scientist, he makes a joke about calling him the “Big Bad Wolf.” The professor laughs it off. This is back in the era when the simple use of the word “nuclear” could make it sound like a dirty word. But, in fact, the professor is the one who truly understands what’s going on. Decades ahead of his time, he makes the point that renewables — at the time, principally solar energy — aren’t going to cut it. There’s no way that they can begin to replace fossil fuels. And guess what? 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’s nuclear energy. And the professor comes right out and says it. (Don’t believe him? Watch the powerful Robert Stone documentary “Pandora’s Promise” or Oliver Stone’s “Nuclear Now.”)

But the professor is dismissed — by Rafe, and also by an officious lawyer (Tatiana Maslany) who’s allergic to the word “nuclear.” I was fascinated to see this subject come up in “A Statement.” Yet it gets dropped as quickly as it’s raised, and this raises a question: What is this movie really about? When you reach the surprise ending, the message seems to be that when it comes to climate change, we’ve become a society that’s a lot like Hamlet — able to talk, unable to act. And that’s a point well worth making.

But in a strange way, “A Statement” is an example of that very syndrome. On its modestly budgeted indie level, it’s yet another movie, like “Digger,” that seems to be about nothing so much as members of the Hollywood community signaling their concern. But if they’re really so concerned, why don’t they put aside the familiar tropes about climate change — the hand-wringing and the hectoring — and do something that’s really outside the box? “A Statement” catches a moment in time, and gives you an intriguing window into just how much was known at the time. Yet as a drama, the film is a bit like greenhouse gases. It traps you in a place that’s not bold enough to imagine solutions.