It’s always nice when you can see a movie and metaphorically spit on the Bush administration at the same time. Another such opportunity – with the added bonus of education for some people and confirmation for others – has come along in the form of Al Gore’s much-discussed An Inconvenient Truth. It’s essentially the presentation he’s been giving all around the world on the science behind global warming and the effects of climate change (as Stephen Colbert put it, it’s the highest-grossing PowerPoint ever), with Gore’s personal story of epiphany about global warming interspersed throughout.
Director Davis Guggenheim has a good sense of when to let Gore do his presentation and when to cut to something more personal. He opens the film with a canny scene (which I’ll let you discover) that at first seems corny but actually very effectively takes you away from whatever distractions you had in your mind and puts you in a world where the natural environment is paramount. But he has a few too many shots of Al Gore as messiah, sagely observing the world through an airplane window with furrowed brow, or shot from behind and backlit with a vaguely halo-ish effect.
The movie’s biggest flaw is also one of Gore’s flaws in campaigning. He tells, for the umpteenth time, the story of his son getting hit by a car and, later, his sister dying of lung cancer. It felt creepily exploitative when he did it in campaign speeches, and it still does. Granted, he manages to link both tragedies to his passion for educating people about global change, but it feels jarring and too much like the old Gore – you know, the one who lost the election. Which they also bring up, which in turned raised my anger at Gore for screwing it up. When he says in the movie that he ran for president in 1988 in part to draw attention to global warming, I couldn’t help thinking, You know what would have been a great time to draw attention to the issue? THOSE EIGHT YEARS THAT YOU WERE VICE PRESIDENT!
Okay, I don’t want to get sidetracked here. I have mixed feelings about Gore – I like him, I really do, but I’m exasperated by how he gets in his own way. Anyway, if you haven’t gotten it by now, I highly recommend that you see this movie. Ideally, see it in the theater so it makes more money. Bring friends and relatives. If you know someone who doesn’t think global warming is real, tell him you’re going to see Mission Impossible III, then tie him to the seat and force his eyes open a la Clockwork Orange. (I’d probably go to jail if I did that to Bush, wouldn’t I? Damn.)
The movie ends with several suggestions for how you personally can do something about global warming, which is a little odd because almost all the images of pollution in the movie were of factories with smokestacks and nuclear plants, rather than of sprawl and SUVs and McMansions, which are significant sources of greenhouse gases. The suggestions are nothing new, at least to me. I wish they had included something like “Live closer to where you work” or “If you’re building a new house, use green building materials” or “Think about whether your new house and/or new vehicle really needs to be a gigantic monstrosity that is a blight upon the land.”
There are two points that Gore mentions that I wish he had emphasized more. The first is an excellent comparison of the percentage of articles in the scientific press that cast doubt on global warming vs. the percentage of articles in the mainstream press that do. The second is his comment that this issue is partly about how we react when scientists give us warnings. I guess he was trying to stick to the science, plus I’m sure he’s a little wary of getting too deeply into political waters, but the coordinated campaign of disinformation and the disdain Bush et al foster for science and reality are dangerous and distressing.
If you’re interested, here are a couple good articles about the movie, the science, and Gore:
Does Gore Overheat Global Warming?
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