Critic Reviews

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 sneaks up on us. Its little narrative nips and tucks, its simple additions to the existing record, its notes of humanity draw us into these people’s worlds, their objectives, and their frustrations. By the end, their failure hits us like a brick to the head.

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.

While its message may be a downer, the percussive score and razor-sharp editing keep the pace up, and the dialogue (even some stuff lifted straight from the transcripts) has enough laugh lines to cut through the complex issues at hand. McCarthy gives the audience the same amount of cold, hard facts as any good documentary while keeping the film from feeling like a lecture. It will leave you incensed, and more than a little afraid for the state of our nation, but maybe that’s a good thing.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.