Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Dance
with the Devil
(The Last King of Scotland, 2/5/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
For
those who grew up in the 1970's, Ugandan strongman Idi Amin Dada lived
up to the legacy of his surrealist namesake. This isn't to diminish
the magnitude of his crimes, or the memory of the 300,000 people he
killed. It's merely to say that, in a dull and serious world, his portly,
extravagant, strutting brand of dictatorship was nothing if not colorful.
He did indeed style himself "His Excellency President for Life,
Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the
Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British
Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular." When he
deported Uganda's entire Asian-born professional class, we all shook
our heads. When the pictures arrived of him parading in kilts, or riffing
on jokes about his own alleged cannibalism, we all laughed. Toward the
end, we got to relish his walk-on role as a crazed heavy in the Raid
on Entebbe affair.
Though it benefits from this built-in
nostalgia, Kevin MacDonald's The Last King of Scotland also suffers
from an inevitable predictability. As we glimpse Amin's rise through
the eyes of his white physician Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), we
know exactly toward what endpoint the Amin Administration is hurtling.
That it's still an absorbing trip is tribute to MacDonald, screenwriters
Jeremy Brock, Giles Foden (who wrote the original novel) and Peter Morgan
and—most of all—to leads McAvoy and Forest Whitaker.
Whitaker's Oscar-nominated performance
feels like something of a gimme. With such bravura source material,
the kudos would seem to come with just showing up. But his portrayal
is good at every level. From the spectacle of the public Amin, witty
and even self-effacing, to the lonely, private Amin, given to tantrums
and so frightened of assassination that he's spooked by a bad case of
flatulence, Whitaker never strikes a false note. Indeed, so completely
does Whitaker inhabit his character, we begin to feel sorry for him—almost.
Yet the film's success has as much
to do McAvoy (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe),
in a performance that was—no surprise—ignored by Oscar. McAvoy's
Dr. Garrigan is the kind of bounder who is smart enough to know better,
but believes himself temporarily excused by his youth. Fleeing his bourgeois
roots in Scotland, he elects—literally at random—to seek adventure
in Uganda. He lands at a village health clinic, but still ends up being
bored by it all. Meeting Amin at the scene of one vehicle/one water-buffalo
traffic accident, he becomes the mouse pulling the thorn from the lion's
paw, earning himself an invitation to become His Excellency's personal
doctor.
Garrigan is, in fact, has about
as disastrous an effect on those in his vicinity as Amin does on all
of Uganda. His dalliance with the strongman comes along just in time
to preempt an impetuous affair with his colleague's wife (Gillian Armstrong).
Settling in Kampala during what appears to be the golden age of African
disco (think even more leopard-skin than usual), he repeats the mistake
with the dictator's youngest wife, Kay (Kerry Washington). When people
start disappearing, his first impulse is to rationalize, not moralize.
That regimes like Amin's need opportunists like Garrigan as much as
they need jackbooted thugs is one of Last King's most perceptive—and
essential—themes.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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