DVD Review Of An
Inconvenient Truth
Copyright © by Dan
Schneider, 5/29/08
Let me state, up front, I have never been a fan of former Vice President
Al Gore. He was a right of center Democrat who worked in an administration whose
environmental record was considered, by most ecological groups, worse than the
two Republican administrations that preceded his, and held that office at a time
when the earliest stages of global warming, which he now decries, were first
becoming known. As the second most visible politician in the country, did he
sound the alarums then? Well, no. He wrote a book or two, but did nothing of any
real consequence with the power he had. However, his Johnny Come lately status
as an environmentalist, which led to his winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, as
well as an Oscar for the 94 minute 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth,
has nothing to do why it’s a bad film. That’s due solely to the film’s
director Davis Guggenheim, most noted as a network television director.
Of course, if one Googles the film at such sites like Amazon or IMDB,
there will be plenty of negative reviews of the film. Almost all of them will be
unveiled ad hominem against Gore or simply blatant pro-global warming
propaganda. I did not find a single negative review based solely on the film’s
art. On the other hand, many of the film’s staunchest defenders praise the
film solely because they are pro-green. Even the Chicago Sun-Times’ venerable
film critic, Roger
Ebert, seems to feel that bending down on two knees and opening wide is not
enough praise for the Buddha Gore, writing:
I want to write this review so every reader will begin it and finish
it. I am a liberal, but I do not intend this as a review reflecting any kind
of politics. It reflects the truth as I understand it, and it represents, I
believe, agreement among the world's experts….He provides statistics: The 10
warmest years in history were in the last 14 years. Last year South America
experienced its first hurricane. Japan and the Pacific are setting records for
typhoons. Hurricane Katrina passed over Florida, doubled back over the Gulf,
picked up strength from unusually warm Gulf waters, and went from Category 3
to Category 5. There are changes in the Gulf Stream and the jet stream. Cores
of polar ice show that carbon dioxide is much, much higher than ever before in
a quarter of a million years. It was once thought that such things went in
cycles. Gore stands in front of a graph showing the ups and downs of carbon
dioxide over the centuries. Yes, there is a cyclical pattern. Then, in recent
years, the graph turns up and keeps going up, higher and higher, off the
chart….In England, Sir James Lovelock, the scientist who proposed the Gaia
hypothesis (that the planet functions like a living organism), has published a
new book saying that in 100 years mankind will be reduced to "a few
breeding couples at the Poles." Gore thinks "that's too
pessimistic….In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie
review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do
not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided
not to….Am I acting as an advocate in this review? Yes, I am. I believe that
to be "impartial" and "balanced" on global warming means
one must take a position like Gore's. There is no other view that can be
defended….What is the look? It's the look of no fear….
To say that there is not a critical (in any sense of the term) thing in
the whole review, is manifest. But, even though I did not want to quote as much
of the review as I did, this needs to be known. As bad and uncritical as
Ebert’s review is, the film is manifold worse in hagiographizing St. Al.
And that is its chief flaw, artistically. Whereas Michael Moore sticks
his ugly mug into his agitprop films every three minutes or so, I don’t think
that there’s a single three minute span in this agitprop film that we do not
see Gore, up close, and too close, so that his every pore is seen, that his
nostrils are not heaving with passion. The film opens with some gorgeous
cinematography of a sunrise morning over a river on the Gore family’s
Tennessee farm. It’s a shot that belongs in a film by Andrei Tarkovsky. It is
gorgeous, rapturous. Then comes the bad part- the start of the film-long
narration by Gore, larded with pseudo-poesy and even worse faux insight. Here is
the opening salvo: ‘You look at that river gently flowing by. You notice
the leaves rustling with the wind. You hear the birds; you hear the tree frogs.
In the distance you hear a cow. You feel the grass. The mud gives a little bit
on the riverbank. It’s quiet, it’s peaceful. And all of a sudden, it’s a
gear shift inside you. And it’s like taking a deep breath and going, ‘Oh
yeah, I forgot about this.’’
And it only gets worse from there. And I do not mean the science. In the
main, Gore is in the right. The warming of the globe is driven by man-made
pollutants, which will have dire effects, even if sometimes Gore exaggerates a
bit, such as showing the natural calving of glaciers into the sea, which have
gone on since time immemorial, as if that act, alone, is caused by glacial
warming. Also, while humans have sped up specific extinctions, extinctions are
always followed by a flowering of new species, which adapt to the newer
conditions. But, he is far closer to the truth than assorted website which take
potshots at him and the film, like http://www.aconvenientfiction.com/inconvenient3.html
or the even worse http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html,
a Right Wing propaganda site, which purports to list 35 big errors made in the
film, yet the vast majority of the 35 things are things that the film, nor Gore
ever claimed. I state this because I want to be clear that I am not doing a
hatchet job on Gore nor this film, just giving a straight down the line
assessment in the negative.
The film is basically two thirds of Gore preaching to the public about
global warming by giving a slide show with some neat graphics. Again, the vast
majority of what he states is incontrovertible, and the few areas where he
exaggerates are minor disagreements between the scientific community where he
chooses the worst scenario for dramatic effect. This is forgivable on Gore’s
part, and even the filmmaker’s. It is also quite effective. But, where the
film tanks, and also goes way beyond any reasonable standard for calling itself
a documentary, is in the interspersed other third of the film, where we get the
fetishistic close-ups of Gore as saint aborning, and in the hamhanded
voiceovers. Putting aside the fact that the writing of the voiceovers is
cringe-inducing (see above), Guggenheim could have at least put on a patina of
objectivity by having the voiceovers done by someone else- perhaps another Left
Winger like Tim Robbins. Instead, we are left with the unseemly deification of
Al Gore….by Al Gore!
Even worse we get a parade of Oprah Winfrey-level sob stories about how
tough a life Al Gore has- being born with a silver spoon, political power, and
the disappointment of being out-scioned by George W. Bush for the Presidency.
There are some genuine bad things that the film inexplicably digresses to, such
as his sister’s death from lung cancer and his son’s near-fatal car crash.
So? I mean, what is the point of the film- to act as a documentary about the
global warming crisis, or about Al Gore’s ‘indomitable courage’? Such
courage which propels him to ‘walk alone’ in airports- as if he’s just a
‘regular person.’ Or to spend hours on his laptop computer monkeying with
graphs. Ooh, he’s deep. Yup. Yes he is. Yessirreebob! But, if Guggenheim could
only stop with the up the nostrils viewpoint so many of his shots have. I mean,
even if Al Gore is the greatest man in the history of our species, do we really
need to be able to count his nose hairs?
The DVD, by Paramount, is shown in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and has an
update by Al Gore, which features well known information, and a making of
featurette. There is a music video of the atrocious Melissa Etheridge song I
Need To Wake Up. Whether the melody or the cringe-worthy PC lyrics are worse
is up for debate. The audio commentary by Guggenheim is actually fairly good.
Yes, he’s a bit too fellatric re: Gore the superhero man of action, but the
backstory and technical aspects of the making of the film are interesting. The
producers’ commentary has some moments, but offers not much more than is
learnt in Guggenheim’s commentary.
Overall, An Inconvenient Truth has important ideas, but is a bad
film precisely because those ideas are made secondary to the ego of Al Gore.
That is not Gore’s fault, but Guggenheim’s, yet is precisely why An
Inconvenient Truth is a bad film, and not even remotely a ‘documentary.’
[An expurgated
version of this article originally appeared on The
Moderate Voice website.]
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