thomas4cinema

A documentary by Jonathan Demme about former US president Jimmy Carter, or more specifically about a book promotion tour Carter did in 2006 and 07 for his book on the Palestine conflict. Demme occasionally steps back to give a slightly wider perspective, on Carter’s work as president as well as on the work the Carter Center does, and then zooms in to further document the controversy about the book stirred by the assertion of Apartheid being practiced in the West Bank and Gaza strip. It is interesting to see how a former president travels, how he is continuously under siege by entourage, how the interaction between him, his publishers and the media works, how academic grievances flare up and are being handle… plenty of interesting material, with the slight downside that Demme does not focus on a single one of them. The film title suggests that the film is about the person Jimmy Carter at large, but there is not enough of this in the film to justify that. It seems that the book controversy was encountered by coincidence, and that the film producers lacked the courage and / or permissions to go into more detail on the actual content of this. So it all remains a bit of a patchwork, with the most interesting bits for me being the flash backs to the time of the Carter administration and the Camp David meetings, while the personal story falls rather flat for lack of detail. Interesting, but not much more.