Beyond the Multiplex

"Jimmy Carter Man From Plains": Israel, Palestine and New Orleans -- the 39th president and the road not taken
I've sat through Jonathan Demme's Jimmy Carter documentary twice now -- Sony Pictures Classics has sternly insisted to journalists that its title contains no punctuation -- and I'm still not quite sure why it's so compelling. I think this movie's appeal is overdetermined, as we used to say in sophomore Marxist-theory class, meaning that it derives from so many sources you can't keep track of them all. If "Jimmy Carter Man From Plains" sometimes feels like the portrait of a saint, it also reminds us that saints are strange and private people pursuing a personal compact with an invisible deity, in solitude and often in sadness.

First and most obviously, Demme's insider, vérité-style portrait of the 39th president, as he tours the country in late 2006 and early 2007 to support his controversial book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," offers an implicit contrast between Carter and the current holder of his former job. In just four years in office, while plagued by an economic recession and the Iranian hostage crisis (a combination that spelled his personal political doom), Carter brought Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin together at Camp David for a world-televised hug that promised to reshape the Middle East for generations. George W. Bush has done his part to reshape the Middle East for generations too (and might not be done yet), and perhaps we can all agree that the current direction looks a little different.

Now in his early 80s, Carter appears to have slowed only slightly in his three decades since leaving politics. He's a perfectionist, a precise thinker and speaker who seems almost driven by a desire to be more driven than those around him. He and Rosalynn Carter still live in a strikingly modest house in Plains, Ga. (population 635), and he'll still preach an occasional sermon at the Baptist church when they're in town. But his working life largely consists of endless airplane journeys, hotel conference rooms, radio interviews and lunches with local honchos (for which he is always meticulously prepared). He swims in hotel pools before dawn. He talks to his wife daily while on the road, often in limousines on someone else's cellphone (he doesn't seem to carry one), and always listens calmly to her advice and then tells her he loves her. (They read the Bible together every night; if they're physically apart, they read the same verses.)

There can be absolutely no doubt about Carter's principles and his humanitarian accomplishments -- has ever been a president whose post-White House career was so much more illustrious than his time in office? -- and perhaps it speaks well of him that he's a guarded and measured individual who seems poorly suited to political glad-handing. As Demme captures Carter, in private as so calm he's almost affectless, but he delivers a schoolmasterly admonishment to a couple of "obnoxious" radio jocks who haven't read his book. Every so often he rises above his evident discomfort to don a celebrity persona, swapping jokes about marriage with Jay Leno or telling sentimental family stories for his "bosses" over lunch in the Simon & Schuster boardroom.

On the other hand, Carter seems largely unprepared for the kerfuffle that erupted over his use of the word "apartheid" to describe life in the Palestinian territories -- it's perfectly clear that he doesn't mean Israel proper -- which is surprising for someone with his connections and his grasp of the issue. His thin-skinned response to criticism and his refusal to debate Alan Dershowitz and other defenders of Israel only inflamed the situation and extended the media's fascination with what was, at bottom, a matter of semantics in a generally even-handed book. (When speaking to Israeli TV, Carter places the onus for peace on the occupiers; when addressing Al-Jazeera, he is careful to say that all Palestinian acts of terrorism must end before Israel will cede territory.)

Demme's film never directly suggests that Carter milked the controversy deliberately, once it had blown up, but after all he retains some political instincts. (You may be sure his wife does, at any rate.) We watch him going from Terry Gross to Wolf Blitzer to Larry King to Tavis Smiley, and while deflecting incoming fire at each stop, he addresses the widespread American incomprehension of the Palestinian issue and the ways pro-Israeli forces distort media coverage and political debate. His address to a packed house at predominantly Jewish Brandeis University, with a few dozen hostile protesters yelling outside, is both high drama and grand political oratory -- maybe he had to get himself in hot water to make that speech. We once had this guy for a president? Even the most dumbass country gets lucky once in a while, by accident.

"Jimmy Carter Man From Plains" opens Oct. 26 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, with wider national release to follow.

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