Indie Highlight: An Inconvenient Truth

“Some truths are hard to hear, because if you really hear them – and understand that they are in fact true – then you have to change. And change can be quite inconvenient.” – Al Gore

Director Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truthis the filmic adaptation of former Vice President (and in his own words, the man who “used to be the next President of the United States of America.”) Al Gore’s traveling one-man slide show on global warming, a presentation/lecture that Gore has given over a thousand times in countries all over the world. Gore’s slide show is broken up with still photos, behind-the-scenes type material, stock footage, and voice-over narration from Gore that highlight major moments and stages in his life. The slideshow scenes and the biographical material compliment each other well, presenting the audience with not only the man’s message, but also his motivation.

Davis Guggenheim is a director with a knack for characterization and the ability to relate the political complications of moral issues. He’s directed television episodes of 24, The Shield, and the HBO series Deadwood (of which he is also a producer) – quite possibly the three most politically and morally complex (and intensely character driven) television series in the history of broadcast television. In addition, he has directed numerous documentaries including The First Year which followed several rookie public school teachers working in the Los Angeles school system, which went on to win a Peabody Award (think the Palm D’Or of broadcast television) and the Grand Jury Prize at the Full Frame Festival, the number one film festival for documentaries in the United States. Here Guggenheim is backed by Laurie David, a seasoned television producer and dedicated global warming activist currently working on several other film and television projects on the subject, and Lawrence Bender, the producer behind all of Quentin Tarantino’s films, also a dedicated social and political activist. All three filmmakers have found in Al Gore a kindred moral and political spirit as well as an appealing central character for the camera to focus on.

Since this is basically a one-man show, the pressure is on Gore to do what is expected of the lead actor in a one man show – be entertaining. And Gore does a good job at being entertaining. He doesn’t pass up an opportunity to make his audience laugh. His sense of humor (especially in the film’s animated sequence) has an irreverent Simpsons-like quality about it. Through the autobiographical segments we learn a lot about Gore. We learn about Gore’s first interest in the subject of global warming, inspired by a college professor Roger Revelle, while Gore was an undergraduate student. We learn about his childhood on an Angus beef farm and his love of the outdoors, the roots of his personal connection with nature (anyone who wants to jest at this would do well to read a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, one of histories great alpha-males who also founded environmentalism in the U.S.).

And while it’s hard to think of Al Gore as the next Jack Bauer, the consequences that stem from global warming (all of which presented extensively documented and backed by years of scientific research and evidence) are potentially more catastrophic than the nuclear and biological weapons that the hero of 24 has faced. There are some very eerie facts presented in An Inconvenient Truth – polar bears drowning after swimming sixty miles of ocean unsuccessfully searching for ice on which to hunt; images of dried up lakes now a barren, cracked desert; of the disappearing snow and ice of the Himalayas, the world’s foremost source of drinking water; of a radar image of hurricane Katrina as it passes over warmer waters (global warming has raised the temperature of the ocean considerably), suddenly multiplying in size and ferocity, just before it crosses paths with New Orleans. As it is described in the film, the patterns and predications contained in Gore’s slideshow are “a nature hike through the Book of Revelations.”

In the late Ted Demme’s (Beautiful Girls, The Ref, Blow) 1970s-focused documentary A Decade Under the Influence, filmmaker William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) says something to the effect that the greatest goal of a film or a filmmaker is to bring about change. Friedkin is talking about one of his own films, his 1962 The People vs. Paul Crump, a documentary about a man sentenced to death in Illinois. Friedkin’s film helped reduced Crump’s sentence from death to life in prison – fifty-two minutes of cut film stock meant the difference between a man getting the electric chair or being allowed to live.

And now a hundred minutes of edited film and video may mean the difference between many lives lost in the not-so-distant future as a result of massive heat waves, flooding, drought, tropical storm or any of the other inevitable consequences of global warming. I hope this film finds the right audience, which in this case would be a very large audience that takes it seriously, or a very small audience of extremely influential and powerful people who take it very seriously (or ideally, both). If it doesn’t, fifty years from now, if I’m suffocating in an unimaginable temperature or desperately paddling through my neighborhood on a boogie board or facing off against some other horrible natural disaster resulting directly from global warming, I’m going to think back and really wish it had.