The hazard of global warming is a less than glamorous issue as far
as problems go. In the clamorous, cable-news-cycle-fed race for public
attention — where the issue of immigration can race up the polls like a
hopped-up hare — it’s the tortoise of societal troubles, real and
enormous but full of sometimes hard-to-impart quantitative data. So
it’s perhaps fittingly ironic that former Vice President Al Gore — an
alternately sanctimonious and stiff figure once famously derided as
“not dead, just appearing that way” — has made it his own personal
cause célèbre, most recently as the subject of the town hall
documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
Its very name a nod to this issue’s status as a nuisance, An Inconvenient Truth is directed by Davis Guggenheim, whose credits include the feature Gossip as well as work on 24, ER, Deadwood, The Shield and Alias.
It’s basically a churched-up version of the same lecture that Gore has
personally given more than a thousand times in cramped school
auditoriums and hotel conference rooms all around the country, and
indeed the world. In highlighting our collective constipation and
sounding the drumbeat of the moral imperative for action, though, the
film has one hell of a natural arc, pulling viewers from doubt and/or
slumber through despair all the way through to, hopefully, a place of
roused consciousness.
The film charts rising world carbon dioxide levels (of which the
United States is responsible for more than 30 percent), and their
effects on everything from the melting polar ice caps and the snow on
Mount Kilimanjaro to other changed weather patterns. With a vast
spectrum of data that runs from macro to micro, An Inconvenient Truth
tips into didacticism on occasion — it disappears up its own ass for a
moment in charting the migratory patterns of birds in the Netherlands
without even a good-natured shrug of acknowledgment — but for the most
part the movie is solidly measured. It connects the dots between
events, and presents a clear, causal relationship between our
collective behavior and habits, and the consequences for Earth, and
does so with aplomb.
Most galling is the evidence, both anecdotal and specific, of how
stubborn and largely unwilling to engage on the matter our political
bureaucracy is, and how a stealthy smear campaign against the fact of
global warming has been waged by those that would seek to reframe it as
opinion, if only to further the interests of Big Oil and/or avoid
action and the difficult but entirely necessary choices that come with
it.
There’s an interesting element of revival tent salesmanship to An Inconvenient Truth,
albeit with Gore cast as the reluctant, chastised martyr. Walking
silently through airport security checkpoints — carrying his own
luggage in Everyman fashion, with a Philip Glass-like score by Michael
Brook swelling at his back — the film touches on, with humor, his
failed 2000 presidential bid, and at times plays as a reprimanded
child’s self-effacing attempt at reconciliation. Still, lest anyone
view Gore’s bell-ringing cynically, his concern is as legitimate as it
is deep; he’s been interested in the issue since college, an
environmental hawk since his days in Congress, and has authored several
best-selling books on global warming and related matters.
Though generally presented in a fawning, overly obsequious style,
the film also has a heartening degree of candor, with Gore opening up a
bit about himself and his family, from his tobacco-farming roots to how
his priorities changed when his son almost died at 6 years of age,
leaving him thinking more and more about the world he wanted to help
leave behind for his children. A fuller portrait of the man emerges —
perhaps one that couldn’t have developed without his humbling
presidential defeat, but a revealing portrait nonetheless. Regardless
of personal politics, Gore is a true statesman, and angling genuinely
to make America and the world a better place.
Accompanied by a strong Internet and viral campaigns, An Inconvenient Truth
will nonetheless face an uphill battle on the summer box office playing
field, where noise and color often go over better than substance. Its
triumph, though, is the manner in which it highlights the notion of
political will as a renewable resource. Is the film the cinematic
equivalent of a vegetable medley? Yes, more or less. But everyone needs
some green in their diet. (Paramount Classics, PG, 98 mins.)