A Statement

Funny and terrifying in equal measure, Tom McCarthy’s A Statement is a work of recent history rendered urgently, re-creating a multidisciplinary policy meeting on climate change in October of 1980.

A Statement has a breeze narrative with zippy dialogue that creeps up and slaps you in the mouth with its message at the end, landing a punch in the same impact that McCarthy’s previous work of biographical dramatic filmmaking did ten years ago.

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.

McCarthy’s dramedy is a period piece that slyly meets our moment.

McCarthy reduces an extraordinarily complex global crisis to something almost aggressively simple: a few persuasive paragraphs that remain elusive because language itself proves inadequate—too finite and rigid for what these people are trying to express. Within that exercise, “A Statement” finds politics, science, bureaucracy, compromise, conviction, ego, insecurity, and grief pulling against one another. It’s depressing and maddening, but McCarthy seeds just enough hope in humanity’s desire to keep trying.

A Statement winds up a sobering, if muted, microcosm of what all these sorts of meetings of environmental squabbling look like, with a conclusion that’s almost Beckettian in its futility.

As dry and ineffective as its subject.