John Turturro is the reason to see this unremakable telling of an 1980 conference's effort to try and get word out about CO2 emissions causing climate change.
The majority of this film is made up of recreations of the conference that took place on the eve of Ronald Reagan winning the Presidential election. The 20 people at the conference were together for 4 sessions over 36 hours and this film shows that. All of the dialog in the conference scenes are verbatim wordsfrom the transcripts. It's cut down scientific speak that gets the point across but is rather dry and it feels artifical since the sections feel like they simply jumpred to the chase with no build up. The sequences are so bland that most people are not going to stay with it.
Not staying with it is a shame because the best sequences in the film are the largely fictional ones. Anything outside the conferences are mgnificent and alive as we get real people behaving like real people. John Turturro's nuclear physist comes alive as he crashes a wedding happening in the hotel. He is so good the audience at the press screening cheered him, in the film, in the credits and at the press conference afterward. Everything that director Tom McCarthy thought was in the transcripts is in the made up scenes and he should have had more of those because until we get them about an hour in we don't have real people on the screen. Once we get to know the characters, the film finally works.
Sadly it's too late because like the final meeting, the film has run out of time. Additionally once the film gets to the denouncement you'll be wondering why McCathy decided to tell this story since there is no drama only a lecture about the dangers of CO2. You'll wonder why are we taking this journey when we know they know they are right at the start.
On the other hand McCathy's trimming of the transcripts, like everyone's point of view, is garbled so this probably was always doomed. Things are doomed because McCarthy gives us almost no context. Sure the conference is happening days before Reagan is going to be elected, meaning that he's going to change everything (Paul Giamatti's character is afraid of Reagan axing his department). Like the background of the characters, McCarthy gives us no background as to what was happening in America at the time. There was no effort to explain where the country was at that time. I lived through it, so I kind of knew, but the truth is there was more going on than the odd comment late in the game can explain. McCarthy said this is a microcosm for the period it occured but he doesn't explain what that means. He was clearly way too close to the material and never realized no one is really going to understand what he is going for. He has made a film that is as fragmented as the conference it is trying to portray with the result being just as dire as what happened in real life.
Because the script is so messy most of McCarthy's stacked cast is given nothing to do until, maybe, they do at the end. Dylan Baker's character is supposed to be a big deal, and when he shows up late everyone is in awe but he says almost nothing, and we have no idea who the hell he is. Amy Ryan has one speech at the end thats fine but it just hangs there. Tatiana Maslansky also has one speech but is otherwise a non-entity even though she is someone the film frames as important. While we get to know Paul Rudd's and Evan Peter's characters, but everyone else is forced to exist simply because the actors portraying them have a force of personality or face that makes them register in our heads, but not an actual character.
While not bad, the late night sequences at and around the wedding saves it because we finally get context and character, A STATEMENT is ultimately a perfectly okay film desitined to get lost in the sands of time much like the conference itself.
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