Carter and His Georgia Reach
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

“What always hurts is the editing,” President Carter sighs in Jonathan Demme’s new nonfiction film, “Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains,” which details the 39th president being alternately publicized and pilloried while on a press tour to promote his 2006 best seller “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” The controversy driving “Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains” concerns reaction to Mr. Carter’s written assertion that the Israeli government’s efforts to stem the tide of suicide bombings and other terrorist atrocities committed by Palestinian extremists are tantamount to the policies of racial containment and segregation practiced by the white majority government in apartheid-era South Africa.
It’s clear from the outset that Mr. Demme, who’s known to filmgoers for more popcorn-oriented fare like “The Silence of the Lambs,” is not interested in revisiting or digging into the disputed issues and facts at hand with much investigative zeal. His film neither re-argues nor restates Mr. Carter’s favored position of moving Israel’s contested borders on the West Bank and in Gaza to their pre-1967 positions. But the aforementioned scene in which Mr. Carter bemoans the pain of the cutting room indicates which pole Mr. Demme’s film occupies. The respectfully pointed grilling from an Israeli television journalist that elicited Mr. Carter’s dubious cutting-room assessment is followed by a more solicitous interview with Al Jazeera’s English-language cable station.
Mr. Demme appears considerably more interested in showcasing Mr. Carter’s good-natured personality and impassioned humanitarianism. At home in Plains, Ga., Mr. Carter evenhandedly preaches at his local church, visits the gravesite of a beloved childhood companion, and beneficently holds court over deep-fried quail and iced tea at an outdoor barbecue. But in these early scenes, as in the sound-bite-intensive press junkets to come, Mr. Demme is so eager to present Mr. Carter in a reverential light that he is driven to some fairly clumsy and unnecessary acts of documentary sleight of hand. Mr. Carter’s preaching, for instance, is unaccountably underscored with the kind of emotional music used to sell pickup trucks on TV. It’s an odd fit at best, and ludicrously condescending lily-gilding at worst.
Once Mr. Carter and the film embark on the president’s book tour, Mr. Demme is more comfortable letting his cameras tell the story. His inside look at life within Mr. Carter’s Secret Service-secured cloister is a fascinating view of the advantages and encumbrances of upper-tier public life and fluently captures Mr. Carter’s graceful charisma in action. Whether plunging through Times Square cocooned in a convoy of armored SUVs or patiently enduring Charlie Rose’s pathological need to paraphrase his guests rather than let them speak for themselves, the 83-year-old former president remains poised and serene.
Mr. Carter’s polite embrace of the insanity that comes with a major publicity tour also highlights the absurdity of the media frenzy required to make a book a best seller. The president’s gentle gravitas and Mr. Demme’s unobtrusive, slightly off-kilter views of otherwise familiar broadcast institutions and personalities make for interesting viewing. Philadelphia-based NPR host Terry Gross addresses Mr. Carter with such committed intimacy and ease that it feels as though Ms. Gross and her guest are in the same room — even though Mr. Carter is alone in a studio in New York. Judy Woodruff taps her earpiece and awaits instructions from her producers about whether to proceed with her interview with Mr. Carter as if she were defusing a bomb.
The film also documents the curious mixture of altruism and self-promotion that is rife in contemporary American political life. A visit to a Habitat for Humanity construction site in New Orleans climaxes in a grateful young musician dedicating the new housing he will occupy and that he helped to build by cravenly name-checking his own rock band. But like most of what rings truest in “Man From Plains,” these details are side trips from the controversy at the heart of the film.
Alan Dershowitz’s review of Mr. Carter’s book, published in The New York Sun last November, called the 39th president’s work “indecent” and declared his arguments “ahistorical, one-sided, and simplistic.” Clocking in at more than two hours and decent to the point of hagiography, “Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains” nevertheless tends toward the one-sided and simplistic, and is unlikely to mollify those who cannot fathom Mr. Carter’s position. A doe-eyed Palestinian-American teenager’s tearful plea for tolerance at an Arizona protest rally is juxtaposed with a shot of an ecstatically grinning Jewish-American man howling that the girl’s people are “the laughing stock of the planet.” Mr. Dershowitz’s repeated on-camera requests for a public forum with Mr. Carter are rebuffed. The best Mr. Demme can do in pursuit of balance is offset news footage of the aftermath of suicide bombings in Israel with images of Israeli settlers astride bulldozers clearing away Palestinian homes in contested West Bank areas.
Were the film confined to just the press junket itself, “Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains” might have sustained the fly-on-the-wall perspective of more objective nonfiction films like Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s “The War Room.” Instead, Mr. Demme throws in everything from personal testimonials from Carter Center interns to a vintage appearance by the president’s mother on “The Tonight Show.” Rather than trying to tell a story, Mr. Demme’s film seeks to distill a complex and, one suspects, ultimately unknowable man into a righteous, easily accessible, unassailably singular force for good. Mr. Carter, his ideological opponents, and these times all deserve better.