“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.
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.
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.
