An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

USA, 100 minutes, documentary
Director: Davis Guggenheim
Photography: Davis Guggenheim, Robert Richman
Music: Michael Brook
Editors: Jay Cassidy, Dan Swietlik
Cast: Al Gore

I had better make clear first that I'm on board with the views of the overwhelming majority of scientists today that global warming is real, potentially devastating, and a result of our own activities, and that there are steps we can take to moderate its effects. I was on board with it before a frame of this was shot, or even conceived, mostly because a majority of scientists today have been so perfectly clear about it—and, not incidentally, because Al Gore has been running around yapping about it since the '70s. Looking at An Inconvenient Truth now, more than six years beyond its release, remains for me little more than an exercise in preaching to the choir.

But could it ever have been anything else? I never was the intended audience. That would be the sober chin-strokers who aren't yet convinced that global warming has fit itself into various business models with sufficient deference. The result, as with the discourse in this election cycle just past, is that more often I feel like a bystander and witness to an interminably inane dialogue which of itself holds our world in peril, fiddling while Rome burns. I find myself anxiously wondering on every point, "Does that make sense to them? Is this getting through to them? What don't they understand about this?"


I'm even loath to express my misgivings about An Inconvenient Truth on aesthetic grounds, willing to be a good soldier and jettison such considerations because I have to be honest that aesthetics don't mean that much in the face of such grave danger to ways of life and life itself. But I think on some level we are truly getting all mixed up here. That ongoing standard of mainstream mediocrity known as the Academy Awards saw fit to bestow two Oscars on this: one to Melissa Etheridge for the song that plays against the closing credits, "I Need to Wake Up" (which also won a Grammy, an identical standard), and the other for Best Documentary Feature.

In this golden age of documentary, hastened by ever-increasing access to portable, lightweight, high-grade cinematography equipment and no end of vital examples of creative barriers transformed, rules broken, and great work created—not to mention whole cable channels devoted to science documentaries—this seems a strange choice to appear even as also-ran, let alone crowned as champion, even for the Oscars (and yes, even given how traditionally weak the institution is on documentary and foreign-language entries). I know the award is a way of proclaiming the issue important, and I even understand the efficacy of it on some level (basically, "doing something better than doing nothing"), so huzzahs all around for that. But the more I look at An Inconvenient Truth the weirder it becomes.

For one thing, it's at least as much about Al Gore as it is about global warming. It keeps cutting away to irrelevant side issues about Gore—his son's near-fatal accident, his sister's death from lung cancer, even the Florida 2000 recount. Reasons are offered, his sister's lung cancer for example tied to his family's tobacco farming tied to the denial of tobacco harm by cigarette companies tied to today's denial of global warming, but they go a long way around to get to a point and then they are not that convincing. Unless the presumption in the first place is that humanizing Al Gore is the point of this film, which is approximately where I start to get uncomfortable.

He makes a strange messenger. The tragedy of Al Gore is that, for all his forward-thinking and effective governance (contrary to pernicious urban legends, he played a huge political role in the creation of the Internet, which makes him at least 2-for-2 on Issues of the Day), he has somehow been transformed by a constantly ridiculing media into a one-note divisive figure, hounded off the public stage. He may have achieved some level of authority by working to rehabilitate his image after 2000, but it hasn't been enough. And the fact that his biography plays such a prominent role here signals that in many ways this is actually part of the rehabilitation, following the political opportunity of Katrina, which also happens to be when more people might have been willing to hear the message.

As we saw just a few weeks ago, even a nebbishy opportunist such as current New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg would seem to have more authority, or anyway more ability, to haul this issue into the mainstream. I'm not convinced that, even in 2006, Al Gore was the right messenger. But I'm going to put most of this on director Davis Guggenheim, who pumps this picture full of obviously self-serving gestures. For all the strengths of Gore's powerpoint presentation, and it seems to me very strong, there's a crippling sense of complacent confidence here. It reeks of Just Plain Common Sense in a way that seems to me unlikely to convince opponents of its arguments. This could well be a Guggenheim specialty but it comes with risks I'm not sure he's aware of. Global warming does seem like common sense to me, but in another major release a few years later, Waiting for 'Superman', Guggenheim demonstrates the danger in such an approach. The common sense view that he takes there, which is that teachers unions are instrumental in destroying the quality of education in the U.S., is one I'm hardly willing to embrace quickly, and thus the confidence with which it is pushed starts to become off-putting.

In terms of whether An Inconvenient Truth makes a convincing argument, I think you would have to call it a wash, especially now that we've had time to assess its impact. In terms of documentary, it resides in the lowliest ghettos of the form, where also dwell hagiography, propaganda, and public relations exercises.