An Inconvenient Truth
The film intercuts this gripping scientific argument with episodes from Gore’s life that explain his commitment to the issue: in college he learned that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere trap infrared rays, as a young congressman he tried to call attention to the growing threat, he nearly lost his young son in a traffic accident and realized how precarious life could be, the death from lung cancer of his older sister, a heavy smoker, taught him that self-destructive behavior has to be changed as early as possible. These last two stories were retailed during his campaigns for national office, one reason there’s speculation that An Inconvenient Truth is the opening salvo of another White House run. Yet zooming in on Al Gore as a person seems to work against the movie’s greatest strength–his ability to frame the problem in a gigantic wide-angle shot.
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More than one person has asked me if the movie is deeply depressing, and there’s nothing cheery about the petroleum industry spreading disinformation or the Bush administration doctoring scientific data, both of which Gore documents in his lecture. But as he points out, the technical solutions to global warming are already well established; the only thing lacking is political will. Again he uses the fight against fascism as his model, citing the unprecedented military mobilization that followed Pearl Harbor and concluding, “In America, political will is a renewable resource.” In that respect Gore seems to be way ahead of the filmmakers: their half of the movie valorizes him, laboring under the old but still powerful delusion that history is made by great men, while his half focuses on educating people. After 30 years in politics, watching his own stock rise and fall, Gore seems to have learned that only the public can lead.
