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'An Inconvenient Truth': Compelling account, engaging movie

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Hi," the narrator of the thought-provoking new documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" greets us. "I used to be the next president of the United States of America."

Meet the new and improved Al Gore. Passionate. Funny. Personable.

Where was this guy in 2000?

Paramount Classics

'An Inconvenient Truth'

The verdict: Lights! Camera! Take Action! (And check out the movie.)

Director: Davis Guggenheim
Starring: Al Gore
Run time: 100 minutes
Release date: May 24, 2006
Rating: PG for mild thematic elements.
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On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

Directed by Davis Guggenheim ("Deadwood"), "An Inconvenient Truth" is, first and foremost, an entertaining, fact-filled look at global warming. However, intentionally or not, it's also a showcase for some Gore warming. The former vice president insists the weather changes our planet is experiencing are a moral issue, not a political one. But what better way to bring yourself back into the public eye than by appearing in a film that's getting a nationwide release and lots of press?

That's not to suggest Gore's motives are impure. Anything but. He's been crisscrossing the globe for years with his traveling slide show, from Tokyo to his hometown, Knoxville. Made up of sobering statistics, gasp-inducing photos, multiple charts, even a "Simpsons"-like cartoon ("None Like it Hot"), Gore has created a very convincing and exceedingly accessible portrait of a planet cooking itself to death.

The movie tells us that 10 of the past 14 years are the hottest in all of recorded history. That polar bears are drowning because ice floes are melting and they have to swim greater distances. Through contrasting photos taken a mere 40 years apart, we watch the once-mighty Lake Chad in Central Africa virtually dry up. In 10 years, we're told — and Gore has the photos to support it — there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro. In 15 years, no more glaciers in Glacier National Park.

Gore is deadly serious about these findings, but he often takes a lighthearted approach. At one point, he hams it up on a forklift that takes him to the top of a mammoth graph.

Not everyone who's studied the subject agrees with the movie's conclusions, but, as Gore points out, the title reflects what's happened to scientists who've warned of global warming. Many of them were robbed of jobs, opportunities and income because they discovered "an inconvenient truth."

The picture suggests — well, pretty much flat-out says — that the current administration is, if not to blame, then certainly not interested in improving the situation. And while Gore insists his is an ethical position, not a political one, the final shot of him majestically silhouetted against a heavenly backdrop doesn't exactly come off as apolitical.

Yet the film is quite compelling, not only for what it shows us, but how it shows it. "An Inconvenient Truth" is like an inventive and engrossing lecture by your favorite eighth-grade science teacher, making it an engaging movie, whatever your politics.

Everyone talks about the weather, the old saw goes, but nobody does anything about it. In "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore says, yes, we can do something about it. And here's how.