This year, 1980, St. If you see one movie about a super-geek working group of scientists, academics, lawyers, activists, and bureaucrats who meet in a hotel conference room in St. Petersburg, Florida, to draft a manifesto on climate change, make it “A Manifesto” (at least until a better one comes along). The conference I mentioned actually took place. This was a task dreamed of by the US Congress. The issue of global warming was on the map, and the committee, which met for three days of meetings over a weekend in Florida, was asked to craft a mission statement that would assess the dangers of climate change and make recommendations to Congress on exactly what to do about it.
“A Statement” was directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy, the rugged carpenter of “Spotlight” and “Stillwater”; The film features some fine actors, including Paul Rudd, who plays a fiercely diplomatic conference moderator, Paul Giamatti, who plays a sharp-tongued Department of Energy official, the disarmingly elegant and funny John Turturro as an MIT nuclear science professor, and Amy Ryan, the silent officer who ultimately emerges as the conscience of the group.
As you probably understand, the movie is not a story of high-speed helicopter chases and daring heists. Conference – 20 men and women pontificating, arguing, strategizing, revealing the truth – the entire movie. A movie about “An Explanation” speechso let me assert my own bias: I’m all for movies that are about conversation – humanistic legal showdowns like “12 Angry Men” (one of the best movies ever made) or dinner table dialogue like “My Dinner with Andre” or “Before Sunrise” and its sequels, or Eric Rohmer’s movies. I’m actually someone who thinks about this conversation. like that action (just ask any of my friends). And I love hearing intelligently debated topics, which makes me the target audience for a movie like “A Statement.”
However, I watched the movie with seriously divided feelings. On paper, “An Explanation” looks like an interesting film, but it is also talky and flat, whimsical and meandering, passionate and detached. It wants to be a “Hot” docudrama, but I can’t imagine who the audience will be. My heartless guess: next to no one. It’s not that the movie is bad, it’s that it’s like an endless magazine article in movie form.
McCarthy and his co-screenwriters, Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, decided not to “dramatize” the conference. Instead, they extracted the dialogue directly from the transcripts and presented the conversations verbatim, which was a bold choice on one level. And McCarthy is certainly a talented enough filmmaker to achieve the effect he was looking for. On “A Statement,” he captures the sound and rhythm, the verbal wheels, the rambling essence. strategic planning meeting.
For anyone in any profession who has ever attended such a meeting (that is, almost anyone who has ever worked for a company, the government, or a school system, or belonged to a guild or union), this success can turn out to be a mixed blessing. Because while the not-so-dirty secret of this type of meeting is that it can get things done at best, the truth is that sitting there and listening to endless chinwags and jokes for position, weakening compromises following heel-digging grandstands, testy but somehow mild infighting – all of this can be enough to make you want to curl up in a ball. What we are really watching in “An Explanation” is a kind of epitome of middle-class American entropy.
To be fair, the mild fascination of “An Explanation” is that we eavesdrop on 1980, seeing what people were saying and thinking about climate change in that very different era. You can expect things to remain well behind the curve. But the disturbing twist of “An Explanation” is, “Oh, if only they had known then what we know now!” There is no such thing as. factor. The film is based in part on Nathaniel Rich’s 2019 book “Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Climate Change” about the 1980s, and the book’s central thesis is that we knew everything back then, or at least the most knowledgeable people did.
Originally, the Turturro character was Dr. David Rose uses an overhead projector to present five slides. They show graphs showing where carbon dioxide levels are heading and predict what the damage to the environment will be. The facts are all clear (albeit with minor quibbles): threats to the ozone layer, the primary danger of fossil fuels, the timeline for where everything is going.
Most of us hadn’t heard of global warming until much later in the decade (Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking New York Review of Books article “Is the World Getting Warmer?” was published in 1988), and the idea that a diverse collective like this was fully aware of it made news. So what are the people in the room arguing about? Actually I wish they would argue More. Given that the nature of climate change requires speculation, there is fundamental disagreement about how they should conceptualize the threat to the future. Should we say “This will happen” or “This will happen”? it could be “(This is a valuable conversation.) There are committee members who protect their turf, who don’t want to offend those in power. (Among them is Jason Clarke as a corrupt, corrupt braggart.) But one of the things we’ve noticed is that when it comes to real ideas, the voices on display aren’t that far apart.”
The two most colorful characters are Turturro’s spoiled professor and Rafe Pomerance, the head of Friends of the Earth. Pomerance was one of the first environmental activists to speak out about climate change, and Evan Peters portrays the bearded and long-haired him as an angry establishment hippie excited by everything he knows. He is biding his time before speaking his mind during the meeting, but his position is that the time for adjournment is long past and the committee should make as bold a recommendation to Congress as possible.
It is clear, at least to most of us, that he is right: They need to sound the alarm. Let Congress know how dire the situation is (or how dire it will be if action is not taken). But even if committee members manage to do this (spoiler alert: they don’t), here’s a question: How should they recommend Congress take action? What exactly? should it be done?
There’s a moment at the beginning that foreshadows what the real debate is (or should be). When the counterculture-embracing token Rafe is first introduced to the professor and learns that he is a nuclear scientist, he jokes by calling him the “Big Bad Wolf.” The professor laughs at this. This harkened back to an era when the simple use of the word “nuclear” could seem like a dirty word. But actually the person who truly understands what is going on is the professor. Decades ahead of its time, he underlines that renewable energy (primarily solar energy at the time) was not going to cut it. There’s no way they can start replacing fossil fuels. And guess what? They still can’t. If you want to oppose the oil industry, only one energy source that exists today has the potential to wean us off fossil fuels and that is nuclear energy. And the professor comes right out and says this. (Don’t believe him? Watch Robert Stone’s powerful documentary “Pandora’s Promise” or Oliver Stone’s “Nuclear Now.”)
But the professor is fired by Rafe and an officious lawyer (Tatiana Maslany) who is also allergic to the word “nuclear.” I was fascinated to see this topic come up in “An Explanation.” But it is brought down as quickly as it is raised, which begs the question: What is this movie really about? Once you get to the surprise ending, the message seems to be that when it comes to climate change, we have become a society very much like Hamlet; He can talk but cannot act. And this is a point worth making.
But oddly enough, “A Statement” is an example of exactly this syndrome. At the level of a modest-budget indie, it’s another film like “Digger” that doesn’t have much relevance to members of the Hollywood community. signaling their concern. But if they’re really that worried, why don’t they put aside the familiar climate change tropes (hand-wringing and pressure-pressing) and do something outside the box? “An Explanation” captures a moment in time and gives you an intriguing window into how much was known at that time. But as a drama, the film is a bit like greenhouse gases. It traps you in a place where you’re not brave enough to imagine solutions.