Davis Guggenheim

TV director of Deadwood, 24, and others.

An Inconvenient Truth (2006) -- Al Gore presents (through live Power Point presentation) a very clear explanation of what global warming is and how it will affect us over the next few decades. There's not a lot of time spent on what we can do about it (most of that is saved for the closing credits), but he gets his point across about the danger. Some of it feels like preaching to the choir, but some of it also refreshingly feels like an issue that's finally going to be dealt with in some significant way--which must feel good for the still-jovial Gore who's been spreading the word since the 70s. As a movie, the parts that work the best are those that focus on the slideshow itself, since it's a pretty good one, and Gore is charming and funny even while talking about the end of the world as we know it. The more documentary-style parts that Guggenheim (I suppose) added seem to take away from the overall effect: like discussing Gore's defeat in 2000, his sister's lung cancer, or even the sappy emotional appeals using images of Hurricane Katrina (complete, of course, with sad music). On the whole, the movie is successful on various levels, however: as entertaining movie, as documentary, as primer on global warming, and maybe most of all as profile of Al Gore himself--showing him in a light the public never quite saw him before, certainly not during his "I'm a boring douche" presidential run.