Tom McCarthy’s biographical drama “Spotlight” won Best Picture at the 2016 Academy Awards. The film, which features a series of films led by Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo, was widely praised for its portrayal of the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting that exposed the Catholic Church’s systematic cover-up of child sexual abuse by priests. A decade later, McCarthy says his influential film still hasn’t sparked enough change in the church.
“I heard from a lot of people who saw the movie. After the movie came out, a lot of people felt understood,” McCarthy said. Diversity Saturday night at the New York Film Festival. “Has it caused a lot of change within the Catholic Church? To me, it actually hasn’t. It’s not enough. From my perspective, it’s not enough for every child to be safe. And it’s a zero-sum game. So I’d like to see more change.”
McCarthy’s new film, “A Statement,” can be seen as a cathartic response to the lack of institutional change that followed “Spotlight.” Backed by a strong community led by Paul Rudd, the film follows 20 experts trying to reach consensus on a statement to Congress about the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on the climate.
In 1980, St. Based on a real-life conference held in St. Petersburg, Fla., the film’s opening text calls the meeting “the first meeting dedicated to solving the climate crisis in America.” The group ultimately never reached a consensus, and almost 50 years later, the debate over carbon emissions continues to divide American politics.
“I’m so proud [‘Spotlight’]McCarthy explained: “I think our job as filmmakers is to start a conversation, to get people to think about an issue, but also to shed light on things. I think we did that with ‘Spotlight,’ and I hope we did that with ‘A Statement.’ This movie isn’t preachy. There’s right and wrong here, but we want people to come to the table and have that conversation and listen.”
Coincidentally, “A Statement” premiered the same weekend that Tom Cruise’s “Digger” bombed at the box office. diversity Owen Gleiberman criticized the film as a “bombastic, self-indulgent satire” that attempts to be “the ‘Dr. Strangelove’ of climate change.” Nathaniel Rich, who wrote the 2019 nonfiction book “Losing Earth” on which McCarthy’s screenplay was based, used the same adjective to describe “A Statement.” At the festival, he called McCarthy’s film “the first climate change movie written for adults” and praised the film for being “not overdone.”
“I didn’t see [‘Digger] But I’m very curious to see it,” Rich said. “All I can say is there’s no movie like this. [‘A Statement’] before. There are some films like this on other social justice issues that make the film more of a deeper exploration of the material, beyond a sort of polemic. “This has never happened before in a feature film about climate change.”
On Thursday, 21 states sued the Trump administration over its repeal of federal greenhouse gas regulations on power plants. While the Trump-led EPA believes lifting Biden-era limits would lower costs and increase American energy production, the Democrat-led coalition argues the rollback would set the country back decades in the fight against climate change. This back-and-forth is the latest example of how climate action is being poisoned by partisan politics, almost half a century after the meeting described in “A Statement.”
“Everything is becoming politicized,” Rudd said. “This was not a politicized issue. This [gathering] Republicans and Democrats were really smart people and they realized, ‘This is an existential threat and it’s something we have to deal with. Now how do we deal with this, we need to figure it out, but the science is there. We To know.”
But we To know? At the end of the film, David Slade, played by Paul Giamatti (a government administrator at the Department of Energy), offers Tatiana Maslany’s character a reassuring one-liner about the true nature of science. The 1980 meeting took place just four days before Ronald Reagan won the presidency.
“Presidents come and go,” Slade said, “but if there’s one thing we’ll always agree on, it’s science.”
“Yeah, well,” Rudd laughed. “I think he said that with a bit of a wink.”