JIMMY CARTER MAN FROM PLAINS

On Sept. 30, 1938, England’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain got off a plane after meeting with Adolf Hitler and said Hitler was a nice guy and so there would be “peace in our time.” This was just days before Hitler invaded a neighboring country, breaking the pact he had just signed with England.

Jimmy Carter is a nice person who loves to pray, teach Sunday School and read the Bible and who actually believes, as he says in this documentary, that the Camp David accord between Egypt and Israel while he was President would result in “peace in our time.”

This overlong adoration of Jimmy Carter by unraveling filmmaker Jonathan Demme attempts to put a Christian veneer on pro-Communist, pro-terrorist, pro-Castro, anti-Israel, left-wing politics. You know that the movie is in trouble when the filmmaker says, “Truthfully, I didn’t do any special research in preparation for this film.”

The movie focuses on President Carter’s new book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” and Carter’s book tour. The movie makes it clear that, in Carter’s viewpoint, Israel is the enemy, Bush is the enemy, conservatives are the enemy, and peace can happen in the Middle East if the world would just let Palestinians have their homeland. One would have hoped that Jimmy Carter or the filmmaker would have read Hilaire Belloc’s book on the Crusades or any good history written before 1950 that showed Christians and Jews were living in Israel and that the Arab Muslims were the invaders and are continuing to press their invasion in the 21st Century. Rather than develop a logical argument, the movie films President Carter’s interviews where he repeats the same information over and over and over and over again. In spite of its very thin, redundant content, the filmmaker doesn’t seem to know when to end the movie, so he stretches its length to slightly more than two hours.

Everywhere President Carter goes, he’s deeply admired, applauded and commended. One wonders whether he notices that all this adulation may be blinding him to the truth and infecting him with the sin of pride. The end of the movie during the credits shows him embracing Fidel Castro, playing baseball with Fidel Castro and cavorting with other malevolent figures. He seems to forget that man is sinful and that no one is righteous except when they are made righteous by the shed blood of Jesus. Without Christ, men are wretched and wicked and do wicked things. Castro has cannibalized his own people. His concentration camps are some of the worst in the world. Carter should read AGAINST ALL HOPE by Armando Valladares. But Carter is so convinced of his own self-righteousness and the goodness of the left that he seems incapable of logic.

This movie is so heavy-handed that anyone with a spark of intelligence would gravitate toward President Bush after watching this excessive promotion of the nice, wonderful, gullible Jimmy. That too would be a mistake, although one wonders if the movie isn’t a deep, dark satire because its fawning adoration is so cloying and off-putting.