It's something of a miracle that An Inconvenient Truth, the chronicle of Al Gore's quest to raise alarm about "climate chaos," exists at all. A movie with a scantily clad Jessica Alba presenting a computer slideshow on climate science is implausible enough. Al Gore doing it, well ... even C-SPAN could be forgiven for having second thoughts.
Albert Arnold Gore Jr. may be many things, but he's no penguin. And this is no Murderballian story of triumph over tragedy. It's a story of tragedy over tragedy. His sister's death of lung cancer. The near-death of his 6-year-old son. The 2000 election. All of these crushing blows convinced Gore it was worth devoting himself to a fight that looks unlikely to have a happy ending. Worth his time to schlep his own luggage through an endless succession of airports, gamely presenting his climate slideshow to more than 1,000 small audiences in dingy conference rooms around the world.
This is a film composed of grim science interspersed with grim personal reminiscences.
Pass the popcorn!
That the film succeeds at all is a testament to Gore's slideshow, which carefully, methodically covers the fundamentals of climate science, with some recent, shocking studies thrown in for good measure. There has perhaps never been so perfect a union of wonk and intractable problem. At each stop on his one-man climate road show, he gets feedback about what works and what doesn't. He seeks roadblocks and obstacles to understanding, as he puts it, and attempts to remove them. He's constantly tapping away on his Mac (Apple should be paying some product-placement dough): fiddling with the show, rearranging the order, adding new slides based on new information. It's nerd porn.
Al Gore and director Davis Guggenheim.
"I told you, Davis, absolutely no nudity!"
Photo: © 2006 Paramount Classics.
If you believe a recent article in The American Prospect, Gore's meta-plan since 2000 has been disintermediation: removing the information middleman. After bitter experience, he knows how the media filter can distort. He knows how press narratives can mold "conventional wisdom" unconnected to reality and immune to revision.
With his peripatetic slideshow, Gore is effecting the most brute-force, stubborn kind of disintermediation: he's traveling room to room, city to city, country to country, reaching people in small batches. He's speaking for himself, one crowd at a time.
A Teachable Foment
It's hard to see how anyone could leave the presentation unconvinced that global warming is a problem. There will be points of controversy -- you can expect, for instance, to hear kvetching over what is really melting the snows of Kilimanjaro, and whether climate change really caused Katrina -- but there are so many separate data points, their sheer weight will crush all but the most adamantine denial.
Gore comes off well playing the professor. He was hobbled as a political candidate in an era that mistakes folksy soundbites for wisdom; he sucks at the folksy soundbite. But when he's got 1.5 hours of your time, he loses the robotic bearing and relaxes. As a professor, he's affable, self-effacing, and patiently, steadily persuasive.
The film's big gamble is pushing its portrayal of Gore beyond wonk to prophet: a voice in the wilderness, driven by deeply felt personal experience to carry a righteous torch through 25 years of darkness. This involves much pensive staring out of windows. These scenes tend to be accompanied by breathy, reflective narrations from Gore, initially jarring but eventually almost seductive.
Of course this valorization will madden Gore's many detractors. But even his supporters can be forgiven for wondering why there is an eight-year hole in the narrative. Reagan and both Bushes drift by; conspicuously absent is a single glimpse of a certain someone, name rhymes with hintin'. You may remember him from the years 1993 to 2000, when he ran the joint. That would have been a swell time to start working on climate change.
Still, exculpatory omissions aside, the personal narrative packs surprising punch. It's perhaps best captured in his brief, wistful response to a grueling defeat in Florida: "That was a hard blow, but what do you do? You make the best of it."
If at first, second, and third you don't succeed ...
Gore is like a figure in a Greek tragedy. He is allowed to see an extraordinary danger on the horizon, but his fatal flaw -- an inability to convincingly fake the jocular, everyman charisma that is the coin of the realm in American politics -- prevents him from averting it. "I've been trying to tell this story for a long time, and I feel as if I've failed to get the message across," he sighs.
In the end, that's what matters about the movie. Not whether Gore detractors will be swayed, or Gore supporters energized, but whether minds will be changed among average Americans who have few entrenched political opinions and only a vague awareness of global warming.
Their reaction is the $6 million question. Will they come? Will they warm to Gore enough to stay with him through a lecture? Are there Americans with no settled opinion of Gore?
The press has made much of An Inconvenient Truth as an attempt to redefine Gore as comfortable and relaxed, at home in his own skin (perhaps as the opening sally of a presidential campaign). That attempt, if in fact there was one, meets with limited success. There's a certain formality and mannered intellectualism to Gore that he will never shake.
What unquestionably does get across is a deep sense of commitment and a fundamental decency -- qualities that are, in this age of tunnel vision and moral rot, unexpectedly affecting.
Gore is willing to keep dragging himself off the mat, trudging on, working to transcend his own failings as a politician and an advocate. He's trying. How many people can say the same?
Climate talks timeline: From 350 to Kyoto to Copenhagen and beyond
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Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix
Comments
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Ben Jervey Posted 6:10 am
24 May 2006
Hopefully, though, the slideshow alone will be enough to land some heineys in theatre seats, because Gore's backstory certainly won't.
Here's my take: every good documentary has to have a narrative storyline attached--call it narrative nonfiction, maybe. The science-laden global warning (errr....climate crisis) business has to be rooted in something that humans can relate to. There are stories abound that could've done this. They're just not Gore's. I would've liked to see Gore use someone else's human story--perhaps the Innuits on (although not for long) Shishmaref, who've voted to relocate their entire town after generations living and knowing this place. Can you imagine the scenes from that town hall when the residents make the vote? Goosebumps, people! At the risk of sounding callous--what the heck does Gore's family tragedy have to do with global warming? So give us the real tragic global warming stories happening NOW. Give us islanders packing for the mainland; give us tens of thousands of dead old folks in Europe--the paying audience wants to be moved. They need to feel peril, not stroll about a tobacco farm.
And I could get into how the melodramatic shots of Gore posing and posteuring for crowds--practically ready for a NH syndicate commercial break--will mire the entire issue in politics. Forget about the audience immediately in the seats--if the media decides this is a campaign move, then the true message of the movie will be totally wasted.
(So can we stop talking about Gore running in 08, at least for like 4 months or so for this film to marinade in the public mind?)
Sorry--had to vent. I've been talking this movie up for so long, organizing people in NYC to hit it up on opening weekend, but it does bum me out some that it's not the Totally Riveting Cinematic Event that it could've been.
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blainenay Posted 1:07 pm
24 May 2006
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caniscandida Posted 6:27 pm
24 May 2006
The TV ad for "An Inconvenient Truth" includes a snippet of Al standing in front of a map of Manhattan, pointing with a pointer at ground zero, saying that that whole neighborhood will be among the earliest to be inundated, once sea levels start rising significantly.
No doubt he is right. But apparently, the development of ground zero is in such disarray that no one involved in it seems to care. Why?
To that we should add another big architectural project in NYC: Renzo Piano's plan for a big new campus of Columbia University, from 125th to 133rd Streets, and from Broadway west. This was discussed in last Sunday's NY Times Magazine, in terms mostly of neighborhood-relations issues. There is apparently no acknowledgement from anybody that 125th Street runs through a valley, just a few feet above the Hudson, and so obviously among the first places to be inundated. Again, why the neglect?
As for us, we live up by old Columbia, in one of the most elevated places on the island. And as I may have written before, I am considering investing in a fleet of gondolas, the fold-up kind, which I would keep stored in the back of my closet, behind my winter coats.
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amazingdrx Posted 11:05 pm
24 May 2006
It's a mass migration, shocking even me. Retiring in the hurricane plagued red states is right out, housing prices are dropping fast in Bush country. A fire (drought) sale?
What I want to know? Has Homeland Security tested out the backup systems for the various banks, insurance companies,stock and commodity markets based in Manhattan?
I doubt it. Basements at all the biggest financial transaction institutions flooded and all those records gone. Pensions, IRAs, loans, are they secure? Would the Bush administration or congress care?
Apparently not.
How about evacuation plans for Manhattan? As good as New Orleans? Again, serious doubts!
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ichoose Posted 1:47 am
25 May 2006
For those who have seen the movie - does it offer lots of ideas on how we can all make changes - big and small>
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jb943 Posted 6:51 am
26 May 2006
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David Roberts Posted 7:36 am
26 May 2006
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David Roberts Posted 7:37 am
26 May 2006
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caniscandida Posted 7:48 pm
26 May 2006
And I expect the review will do its part in encouraging people to go see the movie. I plan to go later today or tomorrow.
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amazingdrx Posted 11:11 pm
26 May 2006
This doesn't help at all. Hehey.
I see signs of resistance to this film similar to the local resistance to "Farenheit 911". Limited release because of Bush supporters who own regional theater chains.
That means it is irritating the faithbased, good job Al!
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caniscandida Posted 12:43 am
27 May 2006
Surely Ms. Alba's hard work making "Flipper" give her all the environmentalist credentials anyone could require of her. And that was back during the vice-presidency of Al Gore, too.
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caniscandida Posted 1:35 am
27 May 2006
http://www.cyrune.com/pulp.html
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amazingdrx Posted 2:01 am
27 May 2006
There's a thought, how about an Ed Wood type climate change docudrama, complete with Ms. Albee and flipper battling a genetically mutated anti-environmentalist cyborg surveilance octopus!
Wielded by remote control by the evil forces of Lord Cheney Of Halliburton.
It would make a better video game than Al's movie, capturing the attention of youngsters everywhere, including young at heart male fans of scantily clad actresses/spokes models everywhere!
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:43 am
27 May 2006
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amazingdrx Posted 10:05 pm
27 May 2006
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Soultek Posted 12:52 pm
31 May 2006
While I will probably watch Mr. Gore's movie, it isn't going to change anything. The believers will still believe and everyone else simply won't go see the movie.
Inevitably, a movie is just talk, talk, talk - the very essence of Al Gore.
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downbabylon Posted 7:50 am
20 Aug 2006
What I have a problem with is the way his political ambitions have sometimes conveniently trumped this commitment. The biggest single example of this was the debate with Ross Perot, in which he basically sold NAFTA to a then skeptical American public.
At the time there were hundreds of environmental groups who opposed the legislation for reasons to numerous to mention, and many of the issues upon which this opposition was based have indeed come to pass. Few environmentalists would argue that trade liberalization in general, and NAFTA in particular, have not had a devastatingly negative effect on the environment.
I believe that this single political act (promoting NAFTA in the debate) has had a more significant effect on the environment than all of his efforts to raise environmental issues in the public sphere combined. Simply put, I believe that when taken as a whole, his actions in public and private life have done more harm than good to the environment.
I applaud his current efforts, but question his credibility as a spokesman for the cause.
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frenaso4 Posted 6:00 am
31 Oct 2006
There's a thought, how about an Ed Wood type climate change docudrama, complete with Ms. Albee and flipper battling a genetically mutated anti-environmentalist cyborg surveilance octopus!
Wielded by remote control, by the evil forces of Lord Cheney Of Halliburton.
It would make a better video game than Al's movie, capturing the attention of youngsters everywhere, including young at heart male fans of scantily clad actresses/spokes models everywhere!
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mpenarubia Posted 7:18 am
11 Feb 2007
Today we are putting our energies together to implore Mr. Gore to use current technology to reach and awaken more citizens of our planet.
Please help by sharing the petition with your friends and families, post it on relevant message boards and other media then encourage those whom you share this with to do the same. Even if you have not seen the movie, it is more the reason to participate. To read and to sign the petition, kindly follow the link below.
http://www.petitiononline.com/cealgore/petition.html
I realize that the petition could have been written differently but I am not able to change it since it is live. The intention of this petition is not a critique on Mr. Gore and his actions but, to spread global awareness quicker.
We can make a difference!
With Love,
MP
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zocham3 Posted 1:09 am
06 May 2008
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