Jimmy Carter Man from Plains, The Banishment and Death Defying Acts

5:01pm Wednesday 20th August 2008

he central premise of Jonathan Demme's documentary Jimmy Carter Man From Plains is that the US made a big mistake in not re-electing its 39th President, as not only were so many of his policies ahead of their time, but the world would also have been spared 20 years of Ronald Reagan and the Bush dynasty. Yet in following the 82-year-old on a nationwide tour promoting his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Demme is too often guilty of canonising Carter and trivialising complex issues.

Demme's hero worship is evident from the opening footage of Carter on his Georgia peanut farm, as he rhapsodises about the black nanny who raised him and communes with some co-religionists at a folksy barbecue. But it's the carefully chosen news clips that do most to reinforce the notion that Carter was a great man who was betrayed by an ungrateful nation. Demme balances the calamity of the Iranian hostage saga with images of Carter as eco-champion and the potential saviour of the Middle East, whose efforts with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David in 1978 were wasted by the improvident leaders who succeeded them. But the most fascinating aspect of the film is Carter's unflinching eloquence in defence of his far-from-original thesis about Israel's oppressive policies in the Occupied Territories, which drew hysterical accusations of anti-Semitism from critics in the media and the establishment whose lack of intellectual composure frequently leaves them open to Carter's temperate disdain and Demme's gleeful ridicule. The Nobel laureate allows the mask to slip during an emotional address at Brandeis University. But it's easy to see why Demme could so readily be seduced by Carter's steely meekness and sanguine sense.

Following the acclaim for The Return, Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev falls prey to second picture syndrome with The Banishment, a loose adaptation of William Saroyan's novel, The Laughing Matter, in which the melancholic Konstantin Lavronenko conspires with shifty brother Alexander Baluev to abort the baby that wife Maria Bonnevie has just informed him does not belong to him.

The story is gruellingly compelling and the sombre twist is faultlessly executed. Moreover, the performances are exemplary, with Lavronenko thoroughly meriting his Best Actor prize at Cannes, while Mikhail Krichman's photography manages to be simultaneously spectacular and naturalistic.

But Zvyagintsev ladles on the religious symbolism and shoehorns awkward references to the Old Masters into action already groaning under the weight of stylistic tributes to such arthouse heavyweights as Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Sergei Paradjanov and Andrei Tarkovsky. Consequently, this feels more like a ciné dissertation designed to showcase Zvyagintsev's appreciation of the medium than an original piece of cinema.

Gillian Armstrong similarly misses her step with Death Defying Acts, a romantic fantasy set in 1926 Edinburgh that turns on the relationship between Harry Houdini and a fake medium out to win the $10,000 he is offering to anyone who can reveal his late mother's last words.

The period trappings are handsome enough, but the action is too often hamstrung by one-dimensionality. The mix of historical and fictional characters never gels and the implausibility of the scenario is exacerbated by the absence of chemistry between Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones, which makes it impossible to believe that the famously sceptical escapologist would show such faith in so obvious a fraud, let alone fall passionately in love with her simply because she bears an uncanny resemblance to his lamented parent.

Saoirse Ronan and Timothy Spall are marginally more persuasive as Zeta-Jones's daughter-sidekick and Pearce's hard-nosed manager. But it's difficult to recognise the hand of Australia's finest female director in this muddled, mediocre melodrama.