Tom McCarthy’s biographical drama “Spotlight” won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 2016. The film, featuring a stacked ensemble led by Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo, was widely praised for chronicling the investigative reporting by the Boston Globe that exposed the Catholic Church’s systemic cover-up of sexual abuse of children by priests. A decade later, McCarthy says his influential film still hasn’t galvanized enough change within the church.
“I’ve heard from a lot of people who saw the movie. A lot of people who felt understood after the movie was released,” McCarthy told Variety Saturday night at the New York Film Festival. “Has it caused a lot of change within the Catholic Church? In my opinion, not really. Not enough. It’s not enough until every child is safe, as far as I’m concerned. And that’s a zero sum game. So, I would like to see more change.”
McCarthy’s new film, “A Statement,” could be seen as a cathartic response to the lack of institutional change that followed “Spotlight.” Bolstered by a strong ensemble led by Paul Rudd, the film follows 20 experts who attempt to reach a consensus on a statement to Congress about the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on the climate.
Based on a real-life conference that took place in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1980, the film’s opening text calls the gathering “the first meeting dedicated to solving the climate crisis in America.” The group, ultimately, never reached a consensus — and nearly 50 years later, the debate over carbon emissions continues to divide American politics.
“I’m very proud of [‘Spotlight’],” McCarthy explained. “I think, as filmmakers, our job is to start a conversation, get people thinking about an issue, but draw a light on things. That’s what I think we’ve done with ‘Spotlight,’ and hopefully, we’ve done that with ‘A Statement.’ This movie doesn’t preach. There is a right and wrong here, but we want people to come to the table and have thaat conversation and listen.”
Coincidentally, “A Statement” premiered the same weekend Tom Cruise’s “Digger” bombed at the box office. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman panned the film as a “bombastically self-important satire” that attempts to be “the ‘Dr. Strangelove’ of climate change.” Nathaniel Rich, who wrote the 2019 nonfiction book “Losing Earth” that McCarthy based his script on, 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 it for being “not bombastic.”
“I haven’t seen [‘Digger] but I’m very curious to see it,” Rich said. “All I can say is there has not been a film like [‘A Statement’] before. There are some films like this on other social justice issues that movie beyond a kind of polemic into a deeper exploration of the material. That hasn’t happened with climate change in a feature film until now.”
On Thursday, 21 states sued the Trump administration over its repeal of federal greenhouse gas regulations for power plants. While the Trump-led EPA believes that eliminating the Biden-era limits will lower costs and boost American energy production, the Democratic-led coalition argues the rollback will set the country back decades in its fight against climate change. The back-and-forth is the latest example of how climate action, nearly half a century after the meeting depicted in “A Statement,” has become poisoned by partisan politics.
“Everything becomes politicized,” Rudd said. “This was not a politicized issue. This [gathering] was really smart people, Republicans and Democrats alike, who realized, ‘Oh, this is an existential threat and it is something that we should deal with. Now, how we go about dealing with it, we need to figure that out — but the science is there. We know.’”
But do we know? At the end of the film, Paul Giamatti’s David Slade (a government director at the Department of Energy) offers a reassuring one-liner to Tatiana Maslany’s character about the factual nature of science. The 1980 gathering 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.”
