Finally, six months after it first appeared in American cinemas, I saw the movie everyone's talking about. Okay, the movie every environmentalist is talking about...well, the movie every environmentalist in America is talking about.
An Inconvenient Truth turned out to be one very inconvenient movie.
It did appear, finally, in cinemas here in September, but it was only showing in a few London cinemas. I didn't want to make a trip in just to see the film—that didn't seem very carbon neutral of me—so I waited, thinking it would eventually hit the 'burb where I live.
No. The closest it came was Uxbridge. For one night, one showing only.
So I waited until I visited the States recently to purchase the DVD. As I've already mentioned, I asked two employees at Target to locate it, but it wasn't until a young man with dyed hair from the electronics department overheard us that the elusive AIT DVD was found.
Finally last night I watched it, fighting sleep the last thirty minutes, as I was up way past my bedtime. (Sometimes the lifestyle of a bon vivant environmentalist is too much even for me.)
But what I realized is that An Inconvenient Truth is not a movie about global warming, or the more scientifically accurate climate change. It's a movie about Al Gore. Al Gore is the frame through which the story of global warming is told. The theme, if you will, of AIT is that one man finds it impossible to ignore impending disaster, despite the inconvenience of telling the story. His task is so inconvenient, in fact, he has to travel all over the world showing the slides that "show" the story (which emits even more carbon, as the movie conveniently ignores).
Not a single scientist is shown; when scientific studies are mentioned they're referred to non-threateningly, as in "my friend So and So has studied this and he says...". The star of the film is not the Earth; clearly it's Al Gore himself, whose reminiscences are a continuing thread throughout the film.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing; it's a very effective way to present information that may have come across as pedantic if presented in the usual documentary style. Instead, we become engrossed in the story of Al Gore, a man who was once the next president of the United States. As a young man, he became intrigued by something a teacher told him, about the amount of carbon released in the air since 1958 and the potentially dire consequences. As he aged, he faced life-changing events—the loss of his sister, the near-loss of his son, and he realized he must tell this compelling story of the eventual destruction of the Earth.
Many a novelist would kill for such a well-drawn hero, and many a screenwriter would too. One of the first rules they told us in novel writing school is that your hero (or heroine) must have a goal, and it better be a good one. For major block-buster films and best selling novels, high stakes goals are preferred.
What could possibly be more high stakes than the fate of the Earth?
The steps a hero takes to achieve his goal is known as a "journey" in novel-speak but the journey doesn't always involve actual travel. Yet in An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore is repeatedly shown looking from the window of his vehicle or airplane. He's shown in the backseat of a car, with his Mac opened to QuickTime. He's shown walking alone toward the stage where he presents the slide show. He's even shown in a contraption designed to lift him literally "off the charts" to illustrate the increased emissions of carbon in the 20th century.
He journeys to his roots—a farm in Carthage, Tennessee (named for an ancient city-state that eventually ended in flames) where as a child he posed by a Black Angus bull his father raised between Senate sessions. We don't see the methane the bull emits, but it's there, an ominous presence that overshadows the film—CUT! Actually, there is no mention of methane in the film, the greenhouse gas that is 23 times as effective as carbon at impeding the exit of heat from the atmosphere. Missed opportunity by the filmmakers, or were they already overwhelmed by the subject?
Another missed opportunity, according to some critics, is its failure to offer a resolution to the looming crisis (or only the rather lame solution of going to a website which will figure out your carbon output). If we're in a fine mess, how on earth do we get out of it? But I don't think this is a valid criticism, in light of the real aim of the film: to tell the story of hero Al Gore, and how he finds the truth too compelling to ignore.
Plus, providing viewers with a solution for the crisis would turn a hopeful, optimistic film into an angst-ridden film noir we don't really want to see. Cutting 90% of carbon and/or methane emissions is not as simple as installing a bunch of offshore wind farms. It will mean no more air travel for the vast minority of us accustomed to taking short haul flights for the weekend. No more eating food from another continent, raised on a good portion of the former rainforest's output of soybeans. No more driving to work in our comfortable cars, though hopefully mass transit buses will have entertainment centres showing short animated clips.
Like the one about the animated polar bear, searching for a piece of Arctic ice large enough to rest on during a long swim in search of food...this one I had to shut my eyes for, but as long as we're taking mass transit, we might as well be reminded why we're doing it.
Save the polar bears, and save the houses in Siberia. And while you're at it, do something about those crooked trees and the bleached coral reefs.
Clearly, this wasn't a movie aimed at our brains, the Dr. Spock lurking in the heads of all of us. There were no unwieldy scientific terms or lofty ideas mentioned. This movie, instead, was aimed at our emotions, and there it succeeds. We all are moved by the plight of Al Gore, the man with a mission to save the Earth by converting one skeptic at a time, and we want to see him succeed, just like Bruce Willis did in Armageddon.
Does it really matter whether the movie changed any minds, convinced any skeptics? You haven't been listening—this wasn't the goal of the film; rather, its aim was to make you
sympathize with Al Gore, which is really the aim of any film:
to make you understand and sympathize with the main character, even if he's
Hannibal Lecter.
Fortunately, Al Gore is no Hannibal Lecter. We like him okay, especially when he makes us laugh, and for a while we're caught up in his enthusiasm for the subject. We all know peaceful rivers like the one that runs through his family farm, and saving those places seems like a good idea.
But actually doing it is inconvenient, and may take another movie to show us how. Perhaps this one should star Bruce Willis.
