Al Gore's new movie An Inconvenient Truth, which opened at No. 9 nationwide over the weekend, seems destined to be a popular hit and political wake-up call all at once. It's also done something believed to by political consultants to be impossible -- it's taken the very qualities that undid Gore in 2000 and transformed them into the basis of his political comeback. The man charged with pedantry and didacticism, of never failing to give a lecture when a simple answer would do, of acting as if he were smarter than everybody else, is now starring in a film that makes a virtue of each of those one-time vices.
What does Gore do in An Inconvenient Truth? He delivers a lecture, about global warming. He waxes didactic. Pedant that he is, he teaches his audience something. He proves that he is smarter than the rest of us, in that he's developed real, deep knowledge about something we all should care about. And in transmitting that knowledge to viewers, he leaves moviegoers feeling smarter than when they entered the theater. Ennobled and educated by his lecture, in the best academic tradition, cynical Washingtonians have been proclaiming themselves transformed by the film for weeks, like star-struck underclassmen who have received their first true taste of the pleasures of the mind -- of really being made to think about the world anew. Gore even emits a breathy sigh just a couple of sentences into the movie, daring audiences to make fun of him now.
Go through the most controversial media moments in Gore's career and you will find several of the most excessive flare-ups alluded to in passing in this film, sometimes subtly, as with the three clearly intentional sighs or breathy whooshes I counted in the film, and sometimes with greater nuance and emotional complexity than his political career allowed.
In 1998, for example, Gore was mocked for his proposal to, according to The Washington Post, “make a live video image of the full, sunlit Earth -- spinning on its axis against the blackness of space -- continuously available to the world, via television and the Internet.” And now the only such image ever captured makes an appearance in Gore's movie. Filmed by the Galileo spacecraft as it left Earth's orbit to explore the universe, in Truth Gore introduces the haunting stop-action sequence of 22 hours of our spinning globe, evoking in his audience the sense of wonder he promised such images would in the late 1990s.
Most significantly, he once again discusses his older sister Nancy's death from lung cancer, his treatment of which was the subject of tremendous controversy in 1996, when Gore spoke of it in his Chicago Democratic Convention speech attacking the tobacco industry. The media fury that greeted that speech now seems completely out of scale -- Gore was hit with charges of exploiting a personal tragedy, and also with the more serious accusation of hypocrisy, for not immediately giving up tobacco donations or tobacco farming after her death in 1984 -- but in retrospect, part of the problem was that the terms in which he spoke had to be the firm political blacks and whites of a candidate. In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore admits of a more complex emotion in discussing his family's tobacco farming past, and for the first time in his public life you hear in his voice, and in the way the narrative is put together, the more devastating note of guilt. No candidate can admit, in the glare of a presidential contest, a sense of personal culpability for a siblings' death, but in Truth, one hears Gore's regret, and his family's, for contributing to the broader problem that ultimately took his sister's life, and for not leaving the world of tobacco sooner.
As compelling as Gore is, though, in this film, the new insight and appreciation viewers may have of him might not carry through another two years, were he to leave a visual world over which he has some control and re-enter the rough and tumble media environment of live shots, hostile framing, and unscripted moments. What the film shows is that what Gore really needed in 2000 wasn't better political consultants, but a good and sympathetic editor.
Truth is not an uplifting film, but it leaves viewers empowered, providing them with a long list of things they can do to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions and the positive example of the successful global campaign to fix the hole in the ozone layer. No surprise then that it's also re-empowered Gore himself. It's hard to dislike a man once you finally see him the way he sees himself.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.
