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Book Review
| An Inconvenient Truth: A Global Warning. DVD, directed by Davis Guggenheim. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Participant Productions, 2006. 94 minutes, color. Available September, 2006.
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| A few years ago it would have been hard to imagine that many people would get excited about viewing a film that features Al Gore delivering a lecture. And it would have been difficult to predict that Gore's movie would be the toast of Cannes. Yet An Inconvenient Truth seems to have struck a chord with a surprisingly large segment of the public. This reviewer has always found Gore convincing and persuasive, but in the film he displays an engaging presence not often seen during his presidential campaign. Gore's recent, more appealing image stems from his passion for the film's message, which reflects a return to his environmentalist roots, evidenced in his book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (Houghton Mifflin, 1992) and in his earnest speeches on climate change before Congress. The premise of An Inconvenient Truth is simple and sobering: a "relentless rise" in carbon dioxide levels has brought the issue of global warming to a crisis. What is at stake, Gore points out, is nothing less than our ability to live on this planet. |
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An Inconvenient Truth is drawn from Gore's PowerPoint slide show on the science of global warming, which he has presented more than one thousand times to various audiences around the world. This slide show intersperses graphs and statistics with apocalyptic images of melting ice, drought and wildfires, heat waves, and severe storms. Describing recent flooding in Europe as a "nature hike through the book of Revelations," Gore also illustrates the future inundation of highly populated coastal areas—images with terrifying implications. |
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For all the film's message of urgency, the tone does not seem alarmist or sensationalized. Instead, the tone is cautiously hopeful, and the film offers practical suggestions that ordinary people can implement. Nor does the film appear overly partisan; clips of the 2000 election serve not to condemn the Bush administration but to explain Gore's refocusing and turning his attention back to global warming. While scenes of Gore remembering his childhood pets and gazing pensively out an airplane window seem almost cheesy, they serve to humanize him and personalize his public education campaign. Part of the film's appeal is that Gore appears zealous but not self-righteous. In a painful recounting of his family's cultivation of tobacco and his sister's death from lung cancer, Gore sympathizes with humanity's inability to "connect the dots." Ironically, he explains the disproportionately high contribution of the United States to global warming while walking through airports and sitting on planes. |
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An Inconvenient Truth is a serious, worthwhile film that could prove useful in college classrooms. It calls to mind earlier works of warning, such as Paul Erhlich's The Population Bomb and Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle (and Gore mentions the significance of escalating population and the dangers posed by new technology). The film's use of evidence is especially interesting. Gore does most of the talking, summarizing the conclusions of scientists (there are few talking heads and few references to the sources of information). There is little interaction with Gore's slide-show audience, which looks attentive but says nothing. This would have been a very different film in Michael Moore's hands, given Moore's penchant for surprise interviews and exchanges with the man on the street. While it does not employ this level of theatrics, Gore's film delivers a powerful message. One of the most poignant scenes examines the discrepancy between statements by the scientific community—the majority of which agrees that global warming is a serious problem—and portrayals of the issue by industry officials and the press, which downplay "sound science" and inconvenient "fact" as "theory," thereby stalling effective action. In Gore's view, our failure to take immediate steps to ameliorate global warming is "deeply unethical." |
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This film was just released, and time will tell if it will be viewed mostly as an environmental clarion call or as Gore's vehicle to reenter national politics. In any case, it is a compelling look at an important topic, one that should spark lively discussions for years to come. |
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Lisa Mighetto is a senior associate historian at Historical Research Associates in Seattle and the executive director of ASEH. |
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