LONDON: Celebrity took an unusually nerdy form at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The man everyone wanted to meet, talk to and be seen with wasn’t a film star or daring new director. It was a politician, who is in his sixth year of retirement and more famous for what he didn’t achieve than for what he did.

Al Gore has been to Sundance before, but never as a leading man. This year he was appearing in An Inconvenient Truth, a 90-minute star-vehicle documentary. If ‘former vice-president turns movie star at the age of 57’ sounds improbable, remember that this is also Al Gore: famously wooden, inauthentic in front of a crowd, closed down in the face of a television camera. Al Gore, who ran a plodding campaign for the presidency and whose main response to accusations that he came across as pedantic and patronising was to wear more earth tones.

Yet An Inconvenient Truth sold out at Sundance and received standing ovations. The Q&As with Gore following the screenings were packed. “The reception he got was extraordinary,” says the film’s producer, Lawrence Bender (Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, Kill Bill ). “He was a phenomenon at Sundance. He seemed larger than life.”

Those who failed to get into the movie made do with catching up with Gore at parties, where he was hanging out with his wife, Tipper, and Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld, and the husband of An Inconvenient Truth’s executive producer, Laurie David.

“He was the celeb of the week,” says the Village Voice’s Amy Taubin, “both in terms of reporting about him and people reporting to each other. They were all saying, ‘He’s so amusing. Why wasn’t he more like that when he was running?’ There was a lot more buzz about him than there was about Paris Hilton.”

What can a film that has helped make Al Gore sexier than Paris Hilton possibly be about? A partial list of its contents would include the greenhouse gas effect, the proliferation of carbon dioxide, the convection energy of hurricanes, the paradoxical flood-drought syndrome, melting methane in Siberia, the history of the Ice Age and the physics of solar ray absorption. It becomes no clearer why this film is having such an impact when you learn that it largely takes the form of a souped-up Powerpoint presentation.

But it’s riveting largely because of the conviction and energy with which Gore delivers the presentation that is its backbone. Since his defeat by some hanging chads and the US Supreme Court in 2000, Gore has been touring the country and the world, giving a passionate, expertly documented multimedia presentation on global warming, in halls and on campuses, mainly to invited audiences.

This campaign is personal and impassioned. He has given the presentation, by his own admission, more than 1,000 times.

Will Dana, editor of Rolling Stone, recalls seeing it in New York last year. “He was on fire. There was real moral and emotional engagement.” Gore’s knowledge is comprehensive: he has been interested in the science of global warming for more than 30 years, since he took a course at Harvard with the first scientist to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Professor Roger Revelle.

His conclusions are profoundly alarming. “But he also stresses that doing something about this doesn’t mean we’ll all be living in tents,” Dana says. “He sees it as an opportunity for American ingenuity and engineering, and because he’s so positive he’s filling a very important role right now.”

Laurie David was so impressed when she saw the presentation that she conceived the idea of filming it. She gathered together a team of sympathetic film-makers, among them Bender and the director, Davis Guggenheim.

Participant Productions, created by billionaire eBay founder Jeff Skoll, provided the financing. “We flew up to San Franciso to meet with Gore,” Bender recalls. “We’re used to pitching but we were pretty nervous — this was the former vice-president, the man we’d wanted to be our president — but he was entirely disarming, very grounded and charming.

“He’s been criss-crossing the country and the world, getting his message out to hundreds and thousands. He could see that if we made a movie, he could get the message out to tens of millions.”

Guggenheim intercuts slides of melting glaciers in the Himalayas with shots of Gore pulling his bags through airports, like a travelling salesman of the intellect, or sitting in dreary hotel rooms downloading yet more statistics on to his laptop. In between explaining that the hottest 10 years since the mid-1880s have all occurred since 1990, and that coral reefs are dying, Gore talks personally and candidly about events that have shaped his life, among them his son Albert’s near death at the age of six.

Albert was walking away from a baseball game in April 1989 when he was hit by a car and thrown 30ft through the air. He scraped another 20ft along the pavement before coming to rest, apparently dead. A couple of nurses happened to be passing, and happened to have emergency kit with them, and they kept his vital signs going until the ambulance arrived. In the months that followed, the Gores were consumed by hospitals and rehabilitation.

The experience made Gore question what he wanted to do with the rest of his life and led to his writing Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, a meticulous review of what he calls these days the planetary emergency. It is often said to be the best book written by a serving politician.

In the film, he talks, too, about his sister, who died of lung cancer (‘that’s not one of the ways you want to die,’ he says in a voiceover) and the fact that his family farmed tobacco and didn’t give up until after her death. It’s not easy to break patterns of behaviour rooted in economic substrate, he acknowledges, though sometimes, it has to be done.

Al Gore comes across in the movie as a funnier, more relaxed and sympathetic character than he ever did as a candidate. “He’s succinct, emotional, funny, engaging,” Bender says. Marty Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, has known Gore since Gore was his student at Harvard 41 years ago and insists that this is the authentic person. “He has always been funny, charming and self-possessed. It seems that people are starting to understand that now.

“They are also recognizing his honesty, his intellect and his bravery. When he started talking about the environment 20 years ago people thought he was something of a crank. It was a courageous thing to do. He thinks very far ahead of the game.”

Al Gore’s show-and-tell (combined with some coruscating recent speeches, such as the one last month in which he effectively accused Bush of breaking the law) is spearheading a renewed appreciation of the ex-vice-president who, until now, has never quite shaken off his role as Bill Clinton’s straight man. “My ears tell me that there is a reappraisal of Al Gore going on now,” Peretz says.

“I had a letter from someone just the other day, the wife of a very senior Harvard professor of government. ‘Dear Marty,’ she wrote. ‘You were right about Al Gore.’ And then she proceeded to tell me a lot of great things about him that I already knew.”

In Hollywood, an important constituency and source of funding for the Democrats, there is a growing excitement about the possibility that he might enter the race for the presidency in 2008. Arianna Huffington recently noted in her blog, the Huffington Post: ‘more and more, the Hollywood buzz is centring on Al Gore.’

Gore has repeatedly said that he won’t run in 2008, and did so again at a Q&A session after the screening at Sundance. A young boy asked: “Mr Gore, after you’re done saving the earth, will you run for president again?” Gore gave one of his usual responses, the various wry jokes he’s honed to deflect self-pity and anger: “Son, I like to think of myself as a recovering politician.”

His denials are never completely categorical, though. He always leaves himself a chink of light, which is enough for the so-called ‘net-roots’, the liberal bloggers whose darling he has become.

Furious with Hillary Clinton for her contortions over the war in Iraq and her accommodations with the right over abortion, the net-roots consume an enormous amount of bandwidth discussing whether Gore will stand and how to persuade him. But a Gore candidacy isn’t only a net-roots preoccupation.

In December Gore gave a speech about the environment to the faculty and alumni of Stanford and invited Silicon Valley business leaders. He was introduced by Terry Tamminen, the top environmental adviser and cabinet secretary to the Republican governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“The number one thing President Bush says he will do to address global warming?” Tamminen asked his audience, to roars of approval. “Wait two years. President Gore will fix it.”

Al Gore won 51 million votes in 2000, more than any other Democrat candidate ever, more than any Republican except Ronald Reagan in 1984 and 500,000 more than George Bush. And he still didn’t become president.

As he likes to say: “You win some, you lose some, and then there’s that little-known third category.” Following his defeat, Gore became the Greta Garbo of politics.

“The presidency was stolen from him and he had the grace and decency not to carry on an ugly battle,” says Peretz. “That’s one of the reasons Americans have come to appreciate him, because he didn’t behave like a spoilt brat, like someone had taken his toy.”

Initially, though, his silence meant he offered no protest when George Bush declined to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on global warming (which Gore had done much to agree and had previously said was the thing he was probably proudest of in his vice-presidency), or weakened restrictions on levels of arsenic in drinking water, or argued for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Perhaps Gore blamed himself: the environment, his signature issue, had hardly had a mention in the campaign.

He probably planned to start speaking out again sooner than he did, but after September 11, 2001 the political plates shifted and he was acknowledging George Bush as his commander-in-chief.

He finally broke cover in 2002, with eloquently argued opposition to the war in Iraq, which, he insisted, had ‘the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war on terrorism and our ability to lead the world in the new century’ and warning, presciently, of post-invasion chaos.

His far-sightedness about this, as well as about global warming, has led many Democrats to see him as a kind of Cassandra: always right and always ignored. —Dawn/The Observer News Service