A Statement review – outstanding climate change dramedy about a 1980 meeting

New York film festival: Paul Rudd, Paul Giamatti and Tatiana Maslany lead an excellent ensemble in this dramatization of a failed conference on climate change In late October 1980, days before the election of Ronald Reagan , Congress summoned 20 experts in various fields to a beachfront hotel in Florida.

Their mandate was simple: figure out how to address the dire threat posed to the climate by fossil fuel emissions, then deliver their recommendations to Congress in the form of a statement. Every word said during four marathon sessions over the next 36 hours – every disagreement or digression, tirade or truce – was recorded by a stenographer for posterity into a single document, hundreds of pages long, that stands as an artifact from a time when expertise was trusted, before corporate greed and political expediency mired “debate” about rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere in a haze of misinformation and…