Daily Dreamtime

Unlike Bill Clinton, a serial moocher of private jets, Jimmy Carter flies commercial. He shambles through airports, towing a wheelie bag. He and his retinue of Secret Service men bypass security, board the plane before the other passengers, and procure the first few rows. Prior to departure, he takes a window seat, in order to insulate himself from his fellow-travellers as they step onto the plane and glance at him with tight smiles that seem to indicate pride not only in their sudden proximity to an ex-President but also in their ability to refrain from making a fuss. Then, after the plane’s door has shut, he stands up and walks aft, shaking hands, posing for pictures, learning all the children’s names. “It saves me a lot of headaches,” he explained last week. “It saves me from having them come up to see me during the flight.” (It’s hard, but fun, to imagine Keith Richards doing this.) Carter returns to his row and takes an aisle seat—“Rosalynn likes the window”—and the plane leaves the gate.

Africa breaks your heart—that’s the simplest and most persistent emotion that bursts out of such recent films as “Hotel Rwanda,” “The Constant Gardener,” “The Last King of Scotland,” and, now, “Blood Diamond,” the best and most enjoyable of this cycle of movies set against the background of civil wars, ethnic conflict, and Western meddling and exploitation. The earlier films, whatever their considerable virtues, were so thoroughly suffused with guilt over the West’s role in Africa’s misery that they left you chastened and hanging your head. But “Blood Diamond,” written by Charles Leavitt, from an idea that he developed with C. Gaby Mitchell, and directed by Edward Zwick, is essentially a romantic adventure story with politics in the background—an old-fashioned movie, I suppose, but exciting and stunningly well made. In Sierra Leone, in 1999, a civil war, fuelled by the trade in “blood diamonds”—in which gems are smuggled out of the country and sold to European buyers for arms money—has been raging for years, tearing up the countryside and pulling families apart. Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a fisherman, loses his son to the guerrilla army, the Revolutionary United Front, which press-gangs the boy into service. The R.U.F. also forces Solomon to work in the diamond fields, where he pulls a pink stone from the marshy waters. He buries it, but word gets around.