An Inconvenient Truth

I saw a poster for An Inconvenient Truth the other day and for the first time noticed its clever tagline: “An Inconvenient Truth: A GLOBAL WARNING.” Yes, Al Gore’s global warming documentary, which is set for limited release in Los Angeles and New York on Wednesday, is first and foremost a warning; it’s a warning to us all to heed the signs that have been steadily accumulating for years: glaciers melting, polar bears drowning for lack of ice floes, hurricanes increasing in strength, natural habitats and hatching/feeding cycles being disrupted…all due to a steady perilous rise in global temperatures. In this remarkable film, Al Gore makes the case, with a startling clarity, for something the scientific community has known for years: that the only way to reverse global warming is to change our behavior.

Yes, we are complicit, Gore scolds us, with a gentle fatherly authority we’re not used to from him. Through his use of jaw dropping photos, charts, graphs and props, Gore educates us, he shows us how the cars we drive, the electricity we use and the trees we burn all contribute to an unprecedented level of human-related greenhouse gas emissions (CO2 most prominent among them) into the atmosphere, which leads to the thickening of the outer layer thus trapping heat from the sun inside our atmosphere that otherwise would escape. It’s an education that Gore says it’s a travesty we haven’t gotten sooner. The media has failed us, the current administration has failed us, and, on a personal level, Al Gore feels he has failed us. This film is his way of righting that wrong.

As much as An Inconvenient Truth offers a planetary SOS, it also succeeds, most improbably, as a very personal tale of a man on a journey of self-discovery; it’s the tale of a man whose life experiences, education and work have all led him to the large screen before us, his voice booming from the speakers, adding movie star to his already impressive resume. As directed, elegantly, by Davis Guggenheim, An Inconvenient Truth cuts agilely between Gore’s global warming presentation and biographical snippets of his life, with his own voiceover telling the tale. From his growing up on a farm and only realizing later in life the difference between fun and work to the influential teacher he had in college who inspired his passion for the subject of global warming; from the near loss of his son in a car accident to the aftermath of the 2000 election, An Inconvenient Truth juxtaposes Gore’s joys and tragedies with his urgent global warming message. The effect is an emotional journey that a slide show alone could never achieve.

When Al Gore talks about his son’s accident, he speaks of something dear to him almost slipping through his fingers, much as he fears the earth may. When he speaks of his loss in 2000, he tells of responding to the inevitable question “what do I do next?” with a clearer focus on his mission to spread the word about this imminent climate crisis. And when he speaks of his sister’s death from lung cancer when his father was a tobacco farmer, he speaks of unfathomable regret and of warnings left unheeded, all of which motivate him every day to make sure the same fate does not befall us. Guggenheim fashions an emotionally satisfying dramatic arc for our hero, one that takes him from quiet uncertainty to fierce focus culminating in a hypnotic final credit sequence that takes the extra step and tells us what we can do, actively in our lives, to help reverse the effects of global warming. The film both diagnoses and prescribes, even as it moves and inspires.

Finally, never fear, political partisans, on top of all of this, An Inconvenient Truth is a fiercely political film. Gore gets a few well-deserved jabs in at the Bush administration, including their refusal to ratify the Kyoto Accord, the oil industry hacks they put in charge of energy policy and, of course, Bush’s tragic response (or rather, the lack thereof) to Hurricane Katrina. And while it may come off at times as petty partisan sniping or, perhaps to some, sour grapes, the primary message we’re left with at the end of the film is not anti-Bush, rather it’s quite a positive one. Gore manages throughout the film to make the case for the U.S. as a force of progress in the world. He tells of a nation that has encountered great challenges and has risen to them with strength and moral clarity. He cites freeing the slaves, fighting fascism in Europe, granting women the right to vote, and the civil rights movement and sees the fight against global warming as our next great moral challenge. It is a fight that will be won, he tells us, by the forces of progress that have defined our history, and, by extension, that define our progressive movement whose values he sees as ascendant. It is “unethical,” he says, not to do something now about this crisis. “All it takes,” Gore says, “is political will. And luckily, political will is a renewable resource.”

This, of course, begs the question, is Gore’s political will to run for president renewable as well? Whether or not he will run in 2008 is the unspoken question that hangs over each frame of the film, but you’ll certainly get no clues as to its answer. Gore has other more pressing things on his mind here, namely, saving the world one presentation, and now screening, at a time.

An Inconvenient Truth premieres in Los Angeles on Wednesday, May 24, at the Arclight Cinema in Hollywood and the Laemmle Monica Four-Plex in Santa Monica