I'll admit my bias upfront: There are few public figures that I admire more than Jimmy Carter. Carter gives me hope for American politics. He is the walking proof that there is such as a thing as an honest, hardworking and decent politician. I sometimes wonder how much better of the country would have been if he had been re-elected in 1980 and we had been save eight years of Ronald Reagan.
However, having read five of his books, sat through a four hour PBS documentary about him, and zipping through a memoir by his political ad Hamilton Jordon (a book so compelling I read it almost in one sitting), I was no closer to understanding who this person really is, other than that he's good. It's popular to say that Lyndon Johnson was hard to understand, but Carter is another notion altogether.
He certainly comes from a strange family. As his brother Billy put it in 1977: "I got a mama who joined the Peace Corps when she was 68. I got one sister who's a holy roller preacher. Another wears a helmet and drives a motorcycle. And my brother thinks he's going to be president, so that makes me the only sane one in the family." Billy was known for being a bit of a character himself.
Time and again, while watching this film, I thought What makes this guy tick? Carter was eighty two at the time of this film and he seems to have an insane amount of drive. Demme follows Carter as he goes on a tour to promote his controversial book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and goes on constructions projects for his beloved Habitat for Humanity. Somehow, I kind of doubt that George W. is going to be writing major foreign policy documents or flying to India to help people build houses at the age.
The movie is most interesting when it observes how Carter, who seems to almost totally ignore the camera, interacts with others. He flies on commercial airlines, and shakes the hand of every person on the plane. He has a family reunion in his home town of Plains, Georgia, and everyone is so at folksy that you'd never guess a former President was in their midst. There is also a charming moment when we talks on the phone to his wife, and we see that his marriage is successful, to say the least.
But the movie has some serious editing problems. Demme spends far too much showing us TV excerpts of the interview, which are boring and widely available on the internet. Too much of the film is about the Israeli..Palestinian problem without the director bothering to give it much depth. It essentially shows people either praising Carter or yelling at him. I doubt a viewer who knew little about the conflict before the film would learn much, something I'm sure Carter would be disappointed with.
But the picture certainly worth a recommendation as this is the most candid footage we are ever likely to get of a former President. No President in modern history has been more open then Carter, and although I didn't understand him much better through this film, it is at least relieving to know he has nothing to hide.
Jimmy Carter Man From Plains (2007)