By Armond White

Man From Plains
Directed by Jonathan Demme


“I wanted to be both accurate and provocative,” President Jimmy Carter says in Man From Plains, Jonathan Demme’s document of Carter’s 2006 tour promoting his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The film starts as a character study but finds its purpose in the middle of a political storm. Pundits and politicos who don’t like Carter’s thesis (charging that Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories makes living conditions there resemble the human rights abuses in Apartheid-era South Africa) lower the boom, calling Carter a liar, a bigot and a plagiarist.

Demme captures this high-tech lynching in which semantics are used as a noose. Like a scientist studying some unspecified virus, he shows Carter weathering the ire of political correctness. Man from Plains portrays a powerful man struggling to maintain humility in the face of political tyranny.

This is the most candid political portrait since Alexandra Pelosi’s Journeys with George, a mostly unbiased portrait that was made before the shift in media opinion on a president. Demme shows a similar shift happening as Carter meets with interviewers, signs books, takes on lecture engagements and buffets the censure of uninformed journalists, hypocritical academics and assorted authorities, all playing the free speech game. The doc’s drama comes from showing the high stakes, but it also has moments of relief that concentrate on the quality of Carter’s personal interactions. A gentle man, he can be firm, as when describing U.S. news media as “Abominable. There’s no degree of objectivity.”

On one level, Man from Plains can be watched for biographical information; flashbacks to the late-1970s Iran hostage crisis provide evidence of Carter’s personality as key to his performance in office, which presaged such post-White House activities as his hands-on work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center, his public policy institute in Atlanta. But Demme’s mobile camera, scanning tight spaces as well as airport lobbies and the areas around post-Katrina Louisiana and Carter’s Georgia home, keeps situating the former president in the always-spinning world. 

The information age makes it impossible to create Presidential legends like Washington’s and Lincoln’s, but Demme creates a folk narrative that uses the irrefutable evidence of the photographic image to accomplish something approximate to a Davy Crockett ballad—but better. Scenes of Carter facing his critics and defending his position aren’t hagiographic but proof of character in action. The iconic shot is Carter looking out a car window as the world moves by, but Demme’s peripatetic crew keeps expanding the locales, thrusting into new situations. Visible facts counter denigrating rumor.

Man From Plains shows the inquisitive affirmation that Demme achieved on his Hurricane Katrina project Right to Return—New Home Movies From The Lower Ninth Ward. What he learned about homeland informs his sympathy for Carter’s controversial humanism. Declan Quinn’s videography is vibrant and Steve Tozzi’s colorful graphics animate the mundane. Even a sequence of Carter greeting passengers on an airplane is vivid. Demme sustains that moment of fellowship; it condenses a U.S. President’s renown and has the uncanny, real-life idealism of a church social.