The Problem with Truth

By Kyle Smith
This review was printed in Abroad View magazine fall 2006

“An Inconvenient Truth,” the much-hyped documentary about global warming, has enjoyed publicity befitting a summer blockbuster. Perhaps its only equal this summer was the tepid Mission: Impossible III, which also featured a protagonist racing around the globe fighting a vast conspiracy.

Like M:I III, Truth worships its infallible hero—Tom Cruise got a long tracking shot of him sprinting through Shanghai; Al Gore gets an intense silhouette, a town-hall-like audience, a building full of Shanghainese applauding him—and even lines worthy of a blockbuster.

“What’d you find out?” Gore gruffly says into a phone in a dim office. “Working for who?” A short pause. “Uh-huh…mmm…Chief of Staff…” He scribbles something down. Later he tells his unseen operative: “Do a little more to see who his clients were…ahh, so he defended the Exxon Valdez case. …” Espionage at the White House; defenders of environmental tragedies—this conspiracy goes to the top!

Gore’s superstar personality proves that An Inconvenient Truth is hardly a movie. It has pretensions of being an event, and if it succeeds it would fulfill the populist aims of cinema: that it can, quite literally, change the world. That seems to be the drive behind the film, and while honorable, it also feels cheap and more than a little preachy.

Maybe that’s because I want the film that changes the world to be at least mildly interesting, original, and thought-provoking. I have a friend who likes to joke that cable-TV documentaries are just “really good Powerpoints”; with that thinking, An Inconvenient Truth is a masterpiece. It is, quite simply, Al Gore in a dark room giving a Powerpoint. A really good Powerpoint, but still a Powerpoint. We get occasional glimpses into Gore’s life, as well as a number of shots of him editing his slideshow on his Powerbook, but it’s still a lecture with pacing, laser pointers, and animated line graphs.

What An Inconvenient Truth does best is encompass the cultural moment that is right now, through its message and its storytelling. The film (or rather, Gore’s lecture) is about the perils of global warming, but it validates the terror for today’s populace by touching on every controversial political event of the past five years. The film reflects the current apolitical chic, where the default setting is “liberal” (I suppose that’s what an approval rating around 30 percent will do to a Republican White House with two years to go). By replacing the tree-hugging environmentalist with the stodgy Al Gore, the issue becomes accessible without being embarrassing. I could feel my audience’s collective relief: I can care about the earth without having body odor.

We learn that the conflict in Darfur was heightened by the dissipation of Lake Chad—global warming’s fault. Hurricane Katrina and the growing number of major storms—global warming. The Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Well, the pipes that carry the oil are faltering with the melting of permafrost. Global warming strikes again! In perhaps the film’s most touching segment, Gore laments his family’s tobacco riches and the death of his sister from lung cancer, then ties this story to the passivity of the populace with regard to global warming.

I’m not faulting Gore for his persuasive techniques, as they’re more symbolic than logical. To discuss global warming is to describe an evil that, by definition, is too vast to really explain. Within about 15 minutes the film has made a pretty clear argument that we are all screwed, and it spends the next 90 minutes explaining just how screwed we are.

With this redundancy, one begins to look for interesting things in An Inconvenient Truth: there’s the flashback to the contested 2000 election that, rather brilliantly, boils it down to a popularity contest between Gore and Bush. There’s a shot of Gore clapping politely at Bush’s inauguration, a shot that manages to remove nearly all of the artifice surrounding the election.

But in the end the film will survive as a document of today, much in the way that Fahrenheit 9/11 thrived off the political moment preceding the 2004 election. The activist spirit these days, particularly among young people, thrives on art, community, and internationalism. In its closing credits, the film asks the viewer to “Encourage everyone you know to see this movie.” Imagine that little command appearing after any other movie you’ve ever seen.

“This is very important,” the movie says, “and everybody should know about it.” But in reality this is an infomercial, masquerading as a documentary, trying to earn the artistic laurels that accompany the word “documentary,” much like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 did two years ago.

To the film purist, An Inconvenient Truth is an abuse of the medium. The political documentary that is capable of “changing the world” would look more like The Fog of War, which offers a challenging portrait of a controversial figure—not the two-dimensional heroism of a famous politician.

Ultimately, Gore’s message is resolutely clear but also distant. Fighting evil, after all, is a simple enough task—at least Ethan Hunt had to save his wife, too.

Kyle Smith is a graduate of Northwestern University.