It’s tough to say which is the more significant thawing in the new documentary An Inconvenient Truth — the catastrophic global warming that is ostensibly the film’s subject, or the defrosting of Al “Iceman” Gore.
You may remember Gore as the former Vice President of the United States, and the man who famously won the popular vote but lost the election to George W. Bush in 2000. You may also remember him as a long-winded stiff painfully inept at connecting with common folks — especially common folks harboring a fear of robots that assume human shape and masquerade as captains of industry and heads of government.
It’s become a cliché over the years to describe Al Gore as being composed of tin, wood, plastic or any number of other substances that aren’t flesh and blood, but it’s an unavoidable cliché. When Gore showed up sporting a beard in the years following his more-or-less forced retirement from politics, many of us even suspected he’d grown the thing just to prove he had enough human DNA to manage such a feat.
But that was then and this is now. An Inconvenient Truth is a devastating expose of a hugely pressing problem, but it is also proof positive that Al Gore is not only alive and kicking, but that the guy has learned how to laugh at himself. “I used to be the next President of the United States” is how Gore introduces himself these days, and judging by recent activity like his appearance on Saturday Night Live, the notoriously rigid politician is eager to show us he’s loosened up (and even developed some comedic chops). In any event, the information being communicated in An Inconvenient Truth might position him as the Voice of Doom, but, against all odds, Gore actually manages to make us want to listen.
An Inconvenient Truth is the Al Gore Movie in much the same way that Brokeback Mountain was for the longest time the Gay Cowboy Movie. The movie is gussied up with lots of slick visual aids and a sprinkling of odd, personal interludes (more on those in a moment), but it is essentially a filmed lecture being delivered by Gore to a polite, well-groomed audience in the round. Gore comes off as authoritative (in his crisp blue blazer) but friendly and approachable (note the lack of tie) — a likeable guy with a good head on his shoulders, who might have been President and maybe someday still will be.
The messenger is friendly but the message is anything but. An Inconvenient Truth is designed to scare the hell out of us, and that’s just what it does. Gore provides ample but concise, jargon-free evidence of global warming, debunks the phenomenon’s would-be debunkers, then gets down and dirty with an extended cataloging of the effects of unrestricted fossil fuel burning. “A nature hike through the Book of Revelations” is how Gore describes the freakish aberrations of nature on display in An Inconvenient Truth — a series of catastrophic floods, droughts, super-powerful hurricanes (Katrina is one of the film’s star players) and other apocalyptic calamities. The facts and figures appear to be beyond dispute — the world is heating up, the polar ice caps are melting, and when they go, we do too.
Dramatic footage of nature out of balance ensues and, just to bring it all home, the movie conveniently provides maps of a projected, not-too-distant world where what isn’t desert is under water. (So long Tampa Bay, San Francisco, the entire Netherlands, and too many more places to mention). Factor in ever-shrinking natural resources and an unchecked population boom, and the picture painted is anything but pretty.
Even if you’re already aware of most of this information, it’s still pretty terrifying to see it all laid out in such clear and exhaustive detail. And since I’d successfully avoided reading any of the countless books available on the subject (despite my wife practically shoving one in my hands every week or so), I came to An Inconvenient Truth, as many will, a global-warming virgin: a blissfully ignorant state that only makes the film’s warnings all that more effective.
Say what you will about a 90-minute documentary amounting to a quick fix stacked up against the bigger picture of a 400-page book, but time is precious, and movies are how most of us get our information these days. Even my first grader knows about the dangers of an out-of-control climate, after all — through Ice Age 2 — so as long as we’re going to be exposed to major global problems through a film, it may as well be a good one.
Gore’s presentation here is essentially a visually enhanced version of a stump speech he claims to have given “thousands” of times, and he’s got this stuff down. There are problems, however, and they surface in the periodic interludes sprinkled throughout An Inconvenient Truth, at which points the film becomes less about global warming and more about Al Gore.
He frames the global warming problem not in political terms but as a “moral issue,” which is the movie’s cue to segue into those aforementioned interludes, which look a whole lot like campaign ads for candidate Al’s 2008 run for the White House. We get a series of family snapshots as Gore’s earnest voice reminisces about growing up on a farm, work ethic, childhood pets, the death of his sister, and all the other large and small things that made him the man he is. We get a weirdly incongruous sequence reminding us of how Gore was robbed of the presidency a few years back, and then a number of not-so-discreet swipes at the person who wound up in the Oval Office.
Most of all, we get endless shots of Gore staring pensively out of doorways and windows, the weight of the world on his broad shoulders — Al the thoughtful guy, Al the passionate guy and, most of all, Al the moral guy — government’s last honest man, here to rescue us in the nick of time.
Frankly, even the staunchest Gore supporter might blanch at how the movie blurs its agenda with personal politics. Far more troubling, however, is that after nearly an hour-and-a-half of ecological doom and gloom, we get barely a couple of minutes of suggestions as to how global warming might be fixed.
The “solutions” scroll simultaneously with the closing credits, offered almost as an afterthought, as if the filmmakers hope we won’t notice how pathetic it is to believe recycling a few cans is going to stave off the next tsunami. The truth is that it might already be too late for Planet Earth, and that’s the scariest thing of all in a disaster film that makes Poseidon look like, well, Poseidon.
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2006.
