On Screen

JIMMY CARTER: MAN FROM PLAINS

Dir Jonathan Demme w/ Jimmy Carter, Rosalynn Carter. (G) 125 min. Opens Nov 9.

Demme's graceful document of the 39th president of the US manages to pinpoint, through the road-weary minutiae of following Jimmy Carter on a simple book tour, the things that made Carter a special and unlikely Leader of the Free World – and which continue to make him a leader in peace and humanitarianism.

Guided by belief in his controversial book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and a startlingly rigorous itinerary for an octogenarian, Carter is tracked on his 2006 book tour by the clearly adoring Demme. And though the film is still in many ways little more than a travel doc, it captures nicely the strangely juxtaposed worlds of both a great thinker and a genuine man of the people – Carter's using a Sharpie to explain Palestine and Gaza in one scene, then being offered chicken marinated in cream of mushroom soup in the next.

Carter is unassuming, real and, through Demme's lens, tireless. The ways in which we see Carter's everyday movements informed by not only political philosophy but by deep religious faith manage to come across as the antithesis of Bushism – that is, as a natural and humane set of principles from an American whose religious roots are as much a part of his southern upbringing and local culture as they are part of any greater scheme.

LIZ CLAYTON

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