Tom McCarthy’s ‘A Statement’ Examines the 1980 St. Petersburg Climate Conference Through Verbatim Dialogue

If a viewer chooses to watch only one film this year centered on a super-geek task force of scientists, academics, lawyers, activists, and bureaucrats meeting inside a hotel conference room in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1980 to hash out a manifesto about climate change, that film should be “A Statement”—at least, until a better one arrives. The conference depicted in the movie is entirely authentic. It was a mission conceived by the United States Congress at a time when global warming was first emerging as a recognized issue. The committee gathered in Florida over a weekend for three intensive days of meetings, tasked with devising a mission statement that would assess the dangers of climate change and deliver actionable recommendations to Congress regarding what steps should be taken.

“A Statement” was directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy, known for his work on “Spotlight” and “Stillwater.” The feature assembles a notable cast, including Paul Rudd as a diplomatic conference moderator, Paul Giamatti as a spiky Department of Energy official, John Turturro in an elegant and humorous turn as a professor of nuclear science at M.I.T., and Amy Ryan as a quiet functionary who gradually emerges as the moral conscience of the group.

As viewers will likely deduce, the film does not follow a narrative of high-speed helicopter chases and daredevil heists. The conference itself—consisting of 20 men and women pontificating, arguing, strategizing, and parsing the truth—constitutes the entirety of the picture. “A Statement” is fundamentally a film about conversation. Humanistic legal showdowns like “12 Angry Men,” dinner-table dialogues such as “My Dinner with Andre,” Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” and its sequels, and the cinematic works of Eric Rohmer all share this affinity for dialogue as action. For those who believe that talk can indeed constitute action, hearing complex issues debated intelligently makes a film like “A Statement” a specific kind of cinematic enterprise.

At the same time, viewing the film elicits distinctly divided feelings. On paper, “A Statement” presents itself as a compelling cinematic premise, yet on screen, it feels simultaneously talky and flat, grabby and meandering, impassioned and neutral. It aims to function as a firebrand docudrama, yet predicting a wide commercial audience proves challenging. Not because the film lacks quality, but because its structure resembles an endless magazine article translated directly into a feature-length movie.

McCarthy, alongside co-screenwriters Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, chose not to artificially dramatize the conference. Instead, they extracted the dialogue directly from historical transcripts, presenting the conversations verbatim—a daring creative choice. McCarthy demonstrates sufficient filmmaking skill to achieve the effect he intended, capturing the authentic sound, rhythm, verbal wheel-spinning, and quibbling essence characteristic of a strategic planning meeting.

For anyone familiar with any professional environment—whether a corporation, a government agency, a school system, a guild, or a union—who has ever attended such a gathering, this achievement carries a mixed blessing. The unspoken reality of these meetings is that while they can occasionally accomplish objectives, enduring the endless jawboning, jockeying for position, stubborn resistance followed by reluctant compromise, and testy yet bland infighting can evoke a powerful sense of fatigue. In “A Statement,” the audience is essentially watching the quintessence of middle-class American entropy.

To its credit, the mild fascination of “A Statement” stems from the experience of eavesdropping on the year 1980, observing how people articulated and conceptualized climate change during a vastly different era. Expectations might suggest that the discourse would sound severely outdated. However, the disquieting surprise of the film is the absence of a retrospective “if only they knew then what we know now” factor. The movie draws inspiration, in part, from Nathaniel Rich’s 2019 book “Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change,” which posits that the most knowledgeable individuals understood the core realities of the crisis even then.

Early in the film, John Turturro’s character, Dr. David Rose, utilizes an overhead projector to display five prepared slides. These charts illustrate the trajectory of carbon dioxide levels and project environmental damage. The facts presented are clear—despite minor arguments regarding the specifics—covering the threats to the ozone layer, the fundamental dangers associated with fossil fuels, and the projected timeline of the crisis.

Because widespread public awareness of global warming did not emerge until later in the decade—notably sparked by Bill McKibben’s 1988 article “Is the World Getting Hotter?” in The New York Review of Books—the revelation that a disparate collective of experts was already fully informed is striking. Consequently, the core of the room’s debate centers on hair-splitting and fundamental disagreements over how to conceptualize future threats. The committee grapples with whether to state definitively what will happen or to frame projections conditionally around what could happen. While some members protect their institutional turf and seek to avoid offending political authorities—including Jason Clarke as a colorfully corrupt blowhard—the underlying ideas expressed by participants are often not deeply polarized.

The most vivid characters are Turturro’s puckish professor and Rafe Pomerance, president of Friends of the Earth. Pomerance was among the earliest environmental activists to sound the alarm on climate change. Evan Peters, sporting a beard and longish hair, portrays him as a fuming establishment hippie energized by his comprehensive knowledge. Pomerance bides his time during the discussions before advocating for a bold, uncompromising advisory stance directed at Congress.

The narrative underscores that sounding the alarm and communicating the dire nature of the situation is only part of the challenge. Even if the committee managed to convey the severity of the crisis to lawmakers, the central question remains: how should they advise Congress to act, and what specific measures should be implemented?

An early scene foreshadows the core debate. When Rafe, the counterculture environmentalist, is introduced to the nuclear scientist, he makes a lighthearted joke about labeling him the “Big Bad Wolf,” which the professor laughs off. Set during a period when the mere utterance of the word “nuclear” carried heavy stigma, the professor nevertheless demonstrates a profound grasp of energy realities. Decades ahead of his time, he argues that renewable sources—at the time primarily solar energy—cannot adequately replace fossil fuels. He asserts that the only existing energy source capable of displacing fossil fuels on a large scale is nuclear energy, a point explored in documentaries like Robert Stone’s “Pandora’s Promise” and Oliver Stone’s “Nuclear Now.”

However, the professor’s perspective is swiftly dismissed by Rafe and an officious lawyer, played by Tatiana Maslany, who remains averse to the concept of nuclear power. The rapid dismissal of this topic raises questions about the film’s overarching thematic focus. By its surprising conclusion, the narrative suggests that society has come to resemble Hamlet—capable of extensive discussion yet paralyzed by an inability to act—a poignant observation in its own right.

Yet, in an ironic twist, “A Statement” mirrors that very syndrome. Operating as a modestly budgeted independent film, it risks functioning primarily as another cinematic exercise where members of the creative community signal their concern without breaking outside familiar tropes of hand-wringing and lecturing. While the film successfully captures a specific historical moment and provides an intriguing window into the depth of knowledge available in 1980, its dramatic execution ultimately remains confined within conventional boundaries, hesitant to fully imagine alternative solutions.