Screening at New York Film Festival: Tom McCarthy’s ‘A Statement’
The verbatim drama follows 20 experts as they fail to agree on a climate statement after 36 hours of debate.
- Director Tom McCarthy's film "A Statement" premiered on Wednesday at the New York Film Festival, dramatizing a 1980 conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, where 20 experts gathered to address carbon dioxide emissions.
- In October 1980, the group convened at the Don CeSar Hotel for 36 hours with a mandate from Congress to draft a mission statement assessing climate change dangers and recommending policy solutions.
- McCarthy adapted the screenplay from verbatim transcripts of the original meeting, featuring Paul Rudd as moderator Tom Jorling and Paul Giamatti as a spiky Energy Department official skeptical of environmental action.
- Participants struggled to reach consensus, revealing how conflicting personal agendas and bureaucratic hurdles impede translating scientific warnings into actionable policy despite agreement on fundamental climate risks.
- Viewing these debates four and a half decades later reveals minimal progress on climate change, as modern audiences face worsening environmental conditions and rising global temperatures despite decades of scientific warnings.
12 Articles
12 Articles
Screening at New York Film Festival: Tom McCarthy’s ‘A Statement’
Adapted from Nathaniel Rich's 'Losing Earth,' this surprisingly exciting and entertaining film unfolds almost entirely in a single conference room where scientists, lobbyists and politicians debate how to warn Congress about rising carbon dioxide.
‘A Statement’ Review: Just What We Need Right Now — Another Movie About Climate Change! But Tom McCarthy’s Historically Based Talkfest Reveals How Much We Knew in 1980
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.
‘A Statement’ Review: Tom McCarthy Examines The Human Problem At The Heart Of A Global Crisis
Perhaps it speaks to a certain lack of human self-awareness that we have clichés about the impossibility of herding cats and other unruly animals, but no equally familiar idiom for attempting the same with human beings. Because anyone who has ever worked in an office understands that the job is usually the easiest part, and the real challenge is managing the people inside it. Tom McCarthy’s dense, intelligent, sharply observed, and ironically ti…
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