The transformation from scholar to evangelist took only a few hours.
Al Gore, the former vice president, sat in a brightly lit room in a LoDo hotel, waxing warm. On his way to answering a question about media mishandling of global warming, he touched on the Gutenberg Press, the Protestant Reformation and Thomas Paine.
Later that evening, Gore stood before an audience that had just watched “An Inconvenient Truth,” Davis Guggenheim’s documentary feature on global warming. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and opens in Denver June 9.
“An Inconvenient Truth” takes the global- warning slideshow Gore has traveled with like an itinerant preacher for years and leavens that material with biographical moments. As the Q&A began, it was clear the man in black had come to testify, to teach.
But Gore is no lone documentary voice crying out for the wilderness, the seas, the plains, the deserts and the cities. In “Who Killed the Electric Car?” a foxy zero-emissions two-seater does its part for the environment too. The short life and mysterious death of GM’s EV-1 electric car, says director Chris Paine, is “a perfect metaphor for why America was having such a hard time getting out of the 20th century.”
We have arrived at a tipping point. Not the one that says with certainty that the carbon dioxide humans pour into the atmosphere will send us into irreversible climate change. This tipping point is the one that suggests Americans are ready to grapple with a reality that poses serious challenges for humankind.
In April, Time magazine’s cover featured a lone polar bear, eyeing the water between one floe and another. “Be Worried. Be Very Worried” was the cover headline. May’s Vanity Fair starred Gore, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., George Clooney and Julia Roberts as the cover-folk for its “Green Issue.” Evangelical Christians also are expressing concern about the matter.
Gregg Easterbrook, visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, credits this convergence of concern to the growing persuasiveness of the science.
“Ten, 15 years ago a perfectly reasonable person could say the science is uncertain, we need more research,” he said. “Now a reasonable person can look at the research and say, ‘Holy smokes, this is proven. We’ve got to act.”‘
Documentaries have a role in spurring action. At least that’s the filmmaker’s hope. “Movies represent one of the last remaining avenues to present ideas that are new to most people,” said Gore on his recent visit.
From slide show to film
Guggenheim, producer Laurie David and eBay’s Jeff Skoll persuaded Gore to make “An Inconvenient Truth” after seeing the “recovering politician” present his slide show. Snippets of that lecture are some of the film’s most compelling material.
“There’s no question that there is a difference in the experience people have watching that show and the movie,” said Gore. “The main difference has to do with Davis Guggenheim’s decision to put in a few short biographical pieces.
“By the time he told me that he wanted to do that, he had already gained my full confidence and trust, which is good because if I’d known that in the first conversations I would probably have not gone forward.”
Some of those moments – his son’s near-fatal accident and his sister’s death from lung cancer – are touching, if familiar. Others, like a return to the Florida vote count in 2000, turn the spotlight too much from Gore’s passion for the environment to Gore himself.
“Sometimes it seems like a political biography,” said Easterbrook. “If that’s what he wants, he should have just done that. My line is Katherine Harris may be a natural disaster but what’s she doing in a movie about global warming?”
This seems less a Gore problem than a Guggenheim misstep. After all, Gore is wonderfully persuasive, funny even, as he delivers his lecture.
Gore trusts our ability to empathize with the most important character in this story – the planet. Guggenheim doesn’t seem to.
Just like Dad
When it comes to the electric car, producer Dean Devlin and Chris Paine’s dads were first adapters. “Dean’s father, Don, was an electric-car advocate,” said Paine on the phone from Los Angeles. “My dad lived in northern California, and he wanted to try an electric car. We had this motivated fan base in our parents, I think we bonded by that.”
The sporty, fast, plug-in car was in part a response by GM to the state of California in 1990 mandating a timetable for putting zero-emission cars into the marketplace. Even as GM, Toyota and Ford started to build those cars, they lobbied to quash the mandate. Once the mandate went away, GM began taking back the EV-1, which it leased but never sold to its drivers. By 1996, the car was gone. The cars were sent to the Arizona desert, flattened and shredded.
Surprisingly moving, the documentary investigates the demise of the EV-1 as a whodunit.
The director’s inspiration for the way he tells this story may have been “Murder on the Orient Express.”
Suspects include: car manufacturers, oil companies, battery life, the consumer and others. But there is something more Shakespeare than Agatha Christie about the murder.
Earth: on thin ice
While the Gore project and the electric car doc have plenty in common, they also may be at least tangentially related to two recent hit documentaries.
Last summer,”March of the Penguins” seduced us with its determined stars. The summer before that, “Winged Migration” pulled us in with its “birds fly south, birds fly north, and do it again” odes.
This year’s environmental documentaries suggest in their own ways that the ice on which those tuxedoed families sojourned looks thin indeed. And Easterbook notes that North American birds migrations are changing enough to give pause. “Migratory birds may not themselves be related to human survival, but traditionally have been harbingers,” he writes in “Case Closed: The Debate About Global Warming Is Over.”
One could even consider these two documentaries sequels coming home to roost.
But take solace in this pop-cultural thought: It’s Day 730 after release of the global-warming disaster film “The Day After Tomorrow,” and that strictly C flick is being replaced by more entertaining and thoughtful fare.
“I’ve experienced 30 years of aha moments,” Gore said of his longtime advocacy for the environment. “The whole movie is a replication of those aha moments. And the whole purpose of the exercise is to move the American people to a different place on this crisis.”
If “An Inconvenient Truth” does that, he’ll be happy.
“This can become,” he said, “the ultimate action film.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com
