The earth is heating up like a meteor from hell and we're all going to
die. Now, that's inconvenient.  
- Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic
Friday, June 2, 2006


An Inconvenient Truth: Documentary. Starring Al Gore. Directed by Davis
Guggenheim. (PG. 94 minutes . At Bay Area theaters.)
If things are even half as bad as Al Gore says they are, "An
Inconvenient Truth" is the most important movie anyone will make this
year.

The film's significance as a wake-up call about global warming
overshadows all its other virtues. Yes, it handles complicated material
in a clear and entertaining way. Yes, it renders cinematic what might
have seemed like a static lecture, and yes, Al Gore is funny and
engaging in a way you've never seen him be. But beyond that, the movie
brings a feeling of history: Virtually everyone who sees this movie will
be galvanized to do something about global warming -- and everyone
should see this movie.

This makes the film oddly exhilarating, even though the news is mostly
bad. "An Inconvenient Truth," the film version of a multimedia
presentation Gore has been delivering since 1989, treats audiences like
adults, presenting a detailed, lucid and intelligent explanation of a
serious issue. It doesn't preach to the converted. On the contrary, it
directly and respectfully addresses the questions and concerns of
skeptics, methodically piling evidence on top of evidence, until the
truth becomes obvious and unmistakable.

For some, the tipping point will come with the charts showing the rapid
increase in global temperatures and the accompanying increases in
greenhouse gases. For others, it will be the sight of polar bears
struggling to find ice in the Arctic, or of shots of glaciers reduced to
almost nothing in a span of only 30 or 40 years. It's a shock to see
photographic evidence that the snows of Kilimanjaro have been reduced to
a light dusting.

Through these pictures, Gore shows that global warming is no longer a
hypothetical. It's here already, and the evidence is everywhere, not
least in the floods, hurricanes and droughts that we're seeing all over
the world -- our "nature hike through the book of Revelations," as he
calls it. Most ominous of all is evidence that the Antarctic ice shelf
and the glaciers of Greenland are breaking up at a rate well beyond
anything even scientists anticipated. If either were to melt completely
-- or if each were to melt halfway -- the consequences would be dire for
every coastal city, including Shanghai, New York and San Francisco.
Indeed, about a fourth of Florida would disappear, though why Gore
should care about that is another question entirely.

Director Davis Guggenheim intersperses scenes of Gore giving his lecture
with personal scenes, in which Gore recalls his political career,
discusses his lifelong interest in environmentalism and talks about the
crises that have shaped his worldview. We see Gore traveling, getting
searched and patted down as he goes through airport security to deliver
yet another lecture in another city. By his own estimate, he has done
this global warming lecture about a thousand times.

The camera has never loved Gore, but something is going on in "An
Inconvenient Truth," and that's the other big story here. Like John
Travolta in "Pulp Fiction," Gore has come back on the scene heavier,
older and a lot more likable, physically transformed in a way as to
allow people to see him as if for the first time. After years of looking
like Clark Kent without the glasses, Gore looks like a heavyset mensch.
Moreover, the change seems to be more than surface.

In "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore has the look of a man who's been
through something big and awful and has come out the other side. Have
you ever seen newsreel footage of the young Franklin D. Roosevelt before
he contracted polio and contrasted it with the later Roosevelt of
history? The young Roosevelt looks like a slick ambition machine, to
whom nothing bad has ever happened. The older Roosevelt looks just as
shrewd and calculating, but with a look in his eyes that suggests that
now he knows why he's being shrewd and calculating. Well, Gore, who saw
his life ambition turn to ashes thanks to a faulty ballot in Palm Beach
County, has that look, and it's there for everyone to see in "An
Inconvenient Truth."

What is the look? It's the look of no fear. It's the look of someone who
understands that it's not all about him, and so he can finally relax and
be himself. This makes him the ideal conduit for the global warming
message.

Winston Churchill once said that "Americans will always do the right
thing, after they've exhausted every alternative." According to "An
Inconvenient Truth," we're about down to exactly one alternative with
regard to global warming, unless you count sticking our heads in the
sand and waiting for the sand to turn to water. This movie throws down a
challenge. In the next months, we'll see whether Churchill was right.