The weather man
It started as a slide show. Now Al Gore's crusade against the threat of global warming has becomea timely documentary, 'An Inconvenient Truth.'
THIS IS THE AGE of Al Gore, aggrandized. Thanks to ``An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary about Gore's crusade against global warming, the former vice president has, for the first time in years, been the center of the zeitgeist. There have been rumors of political resurrection, self-deprecating turns on ``Saturday Night Live," appearances at Cannes.
But before the rise, there had to be a fall, and that's what intrigued director Davis Guggenheim: Gore small and sad, Gore as tragic figure. The epiphany came early one evening late in the filming process, after Guggenheim realized he hadn't interviewed Gore about the 2000 presidential campaign. He summoned a sound crew to a Santa Monica hotel suite, sat in a room with Gore for hours, talked around the subject as the room grew dark. Finally, in pitch black, he asked about the race, the extended fight over ballots, the concession speech.
Gore was silent for a while, Guggenheim recalls. Then he began to speak, with palpable pain. ``That was a hard blow," he said. ``But what do you do? You make the best of it."
``You think about what it must have been, to be in his shoes," Guggenheim said in a Boston hotel this month. ``The amazing thing about him -- which I think is true with all great characters in any movie . . . [he's] a character who makes a heroic choice. And I don't think I'm overstating it."
That's the key to ``An Inconvenient Truth," which opens Friday: The movie has been billed as an environmental clarion call, but at heart, it's melodrama, a celebration of Gore's quixotic bid to sell his global-warming cause. In the absence of camera crews and chances for personal gain, the film suggests, Gore would still be giving the global-warming presentation that makes up the bulk of the film, trading on fading celebrity to teach the world a lesson.
``He goes from city to city, rolling his bag through airports," Guggenheim said. ``And if a Kiwanis Club invites him, or a civic club, or a Republican group, he will go and give a slide show, for free. That's what he's decided to do with his life. . . . That's as compelling a character as I can imagine."
Even Gore admits to a certain single-mindedness. ``People could say I'm a little obsessed with it. But it's amazing to me that more people aren't," he said in an interview during the publicity tour that has put him, once again, in the position of being wanted.
The fortunes of presidential also-rans are always intriguing and slightly melancholy; after the crush of attention, the return to mundane life seems a difficult blow. Michael Dukakis turned to teaching and championing public transportation. Bob Dole did ads for Viagra. Some politicians have come roaring back to campaigning, usually to fall silent again.
Gore has largely been entrepreneurial -- something the film barely acknowledges. Since the 2000 race, he has launched Current, a youth-aimed TV network. He joined the board of
But he has also spent countless pro bono hours on the multimedia presentation he calls ``the slide show," delivering it several times a week across the country and the world. And if there were times during the campaign when a Gore presidency threatened to be an extended lecture, it's clear this is the lecture Gore was born to give.
Gore's obsession with global warming began when he was a Harvard student, inspired by a professor to track the consequences of climate change. It continued through his years in Congress, when he held hearings on the subject and chaired a Senate science subcommittee. He started to develop the slide show, he said, after a 1989 car accident that seriously injured his son and made him contemplate his purpose. He collected pictures on old-fashioned slides, with help from a photographer friend of his wife, Tipper. He developed a show that used three slide projectors, lashed together awkwardly.
``After the White House years, I got the slides back out," he recalled. And he discovered the limits of old-school technology. Then first time he reprised the presentation, all of the slides were backward . He'd go to venues, ask about slide projectors, and get funny looks. He felt, he said, like a character from ``Blast From the Past," the 1999 movie about a family that emerges into sunshine after decades in a bomb shelter.
``You know, computers!," he said, and then dropped his voice fake-low like a ``Twilight Zone" announcer: ``Here in the future."
He gave a deep, cackling laugh. ``I guess it was Tipper who said `OK, Mr. Information Superhighway, you need to put this in computer graphic form.' "
The ascendancy of geek chic has served Gore well; he comes off as a wonk gone wild, overflowing with self-deprecating stories about falling off ladders and butchering Keynote, the program he used to convert the slide show into a computer presentation. ``I'm a Keynote idiot savant," he says with pride.
The trademark Gore earnestness, central to the film, exists in person, too. The slide show ``does have a sense of mission about it," he said. ``And I don't want to make too much of that, but if you are doing what feels like the right thing -- and it feels to you as if you're doing something that's worthwhile, needed, significant -- and you've spent enough time at it that you think you're good at it -- then, yes, that's fulfilling."
Still, Gore was skeptical, he says, when producers Laurie David and Lawrence Bender approached him after a presentation in Los Angeles and asked if he'd turn his show into a film. Guggenheim, who mixes documentary work with stints directing episodic TV, says he had similar doubts.
``I literally said to them, `You can't make a movie about a slide show,' " the director said. ``Twenty minutes in, I was hooked."
Yet Guggenheim said he also knew that this had to be a film about Gore, an exploration of a character who tried, and largely failed, to convince the world he was right. The personal stories woven through the movie -- about Gore's son's injury, his youth on a tobacco farm, his sister's death from lung cancer -- have largely been used in the political arena. Over the years, some have accused Gore of exploiting personal tragedy. But entertainment and politics hew to different standards. And Gore said he believes his life history ``serves the slide show. It becomes a narrative thread that pulls people along."
``An Inconvenient Truth" doesn't come out in a vacuum; world events and scientific data have made Congress more receptive to the threat of global warming. Still, the film turns out to be an experiment of sorts, a test of whether Hollywood can motivate the public more effectively than Washington can . Gore has said he hopes the message -- nine parts doomsday, one part hope -- moves people to action.
Guggenheim, for one, declares himself changed. He's no environmentalist, he says, but after making the film, he bought a hybrid
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com
