DVD Reviews

An Inconvenient Truth

It's a movie critic's maxim: Review the film, not the message.
 
And then came An Inconvenient Truth, exposing that rule as an Escher structure—deceptively solid, impossible in practice. Roger Ebert went so far as to say that if you don't see this movie, you are morally obliged to explain to your grandchildren why not. Some conservatives flat-out refused to even entertain the notion of seeing it. There's been enough shouting about this film to melt the damn ice caps another ten percent.
 
The inconvenient truth of An Inconvenient Truth is that it isn't really about global warming; it's about Al Gore's mission to tell us about global warming. That certainly dismissed it in the eyes of some, who found it rich to see Gore jetting around the world eco-pitching the converted. (And jets use fossil fuels, the hypocrite! Why didn't he just bike it?) Davis Guggenheim's film follows two tracks: Gore's illustrated Power Point presentation on the environmental crisis, given before a live audience, and Gore "the man", speaking softly, looking wistfully out windows, staring day and night at the bad news from his ever-present laptop, trooping through his dad's farm. It is this second tack that is most problematic, skirting the realm of the campaign ad.
 
But man, that lecture. Gore is a master of "rhetorical architecture," as Guggenheim puts it in his commentary, hooking an audience simply but explosively—carbon dioxide emissions are increasing exponentially; here's how; here's why; here's how it has changed our lives. He brings his stream of data to a head with unassailable examples—here's a graph of ocean temperature changes; here's what it does to storm patterns; here's how it created Hurricane Katrina. A picture is always at the ready: glacier after glacier that have all but disappeared; houses built on melting permafrost that have collapsed; three feet of rain in Mumbai; a drought next door. Gore uses up-to-the-minute (circa 2005) studies; on the DVD, he has provided a half-hour of 2006 updates.

Guggenheim's commentary and another by the producers go a long way in keeping us happy about the non-lecture material. Gore really does travel alone, toting his luggage and taking off his shoes like a shmoe. He really does have roots on the farm. And if Gore is going to discuss events that furthered his life's crusade, there's no avoiding the dovetail between the Bush administration's wilful blindness towards global warming, their Katrina mismanagement, and the unspoken suggestion that both might be different if the 2000 election had swung the other way. Network clips remind us of those developments.

The two commentaries repeat each other and should have been combined (I suspect Guggenheim simply had to re-schedule), but they have value beyond the Gore cheering section, especially when discussing the controversy over the existence of global warming. The production team was careful to fact-check their talking points. A hugging-heavy making-of clip shows the lecture theatre being fabricated at great expense and effort. We also get to see parts of the live-to-tape lecture shoot. Pristine DVD images are aided considerably by some fantastic photojournalism, but props to Guggenheim for the Tennessee footage, often shot with handheld cameras.

Environmentalists are often chided for being overly earnest; this movie not only makes them the level-headed ones, it wipes the smirk off the rest of us. And if it turns out to be the first step in Al Gore's next White House run, it's a hell of a convincing platform. (There's my token biased comment. Happy?)
 

Review By Michael Rottman