Misguided use of a fictional source kills ‘The Last King of Scotland’
By K. Curtis Lyle
For The St. Louis American
When The Last King of Scotland, starring Forest Whitaker, first opened in select cities on Sept. 27, the accolades meted out to Whitaker were universally positive. The Wall Street Journal called his take on the meteoric rise and fall of brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada “one of the great screen performances in the history of film.”
Whitaker lives up to this critical praise song from the moment he appears on screen. His take on Amin is authentic, mercurial, frightening. It’s a creative two hour-plus seminar in the political science of African power in the second half of the 20th century.
The film begins with the arrival of a newly minted Scottish doctor (played by James McAvoy) in the East African nation. A military coup has taken place. Amin, a former master sergeant in the British Army, has overthrown Milton Obote, the former Ugandan president. The Scotsman’s political naivete and sexual opportunism is played off against Amin’s psychotic charm, almost supernatural political instincts, and delusions of grandeur.
Whitaker, as a compulsive and seductive Amin, offers the doctor things he simply cannot refuse. From the legitimacy of a state-of-the-art clinic (African-style), to the social power of a fabulous new Mercedes-Benz convertible, the doctor’s dream life becomes real. Amin gets the doctor’s personal friendship and unconditional loyalty as his part of the bargain.
The doctor can feel the spiritual tug of something being amiss; he just doesn’t know what it is. By the time megalomania and murder are revealed to him as the dictator’s real currency, it’s too late for him to either back out of his deal with the devil or buck up and face Amin down.
Much of what we see on screen is developed by screenwriters Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock from two sources. The first is the historical record. The other source is a novel by Giles Foden. This is where the film becomes problematic and eventually off-putting, weak and downright annoying.
The expulsion of the Asian community did, in fact, destroy the vibrant economic life of Uganda. Mira Nair presented this part of the tragedy, quite beautifully, in her film Mississippi Masala. Idi Amin’s madness was put on full view by French film makers with the uncompromising and volatile documentary of the same name in the 1970s. They simply followed him around for a year with cameras rolling and recorded everything he did, from running mock war games to sailing down the Nile talking to crocodiles as they basked in the sun.
The problem with the second source for this film is that it never happened. The material from Foden’s novel attempts to explain the fabulous insanity of Amin through the eyes of a character – the doctor – who never existed. Worse, the screenwriters have done a poor job of making the doctor either sympathetic or attractive. We feel nothing for him as presented. We see only sexual opportunism and colonial stupidity.
Director Kevin MacDonald seems to want to tell the doctor/Amin story without letting us hate or love either one fully. The doctor is weak and vacant and Amin is so monstrous that we can never really know him as a human being. In the end what we’re seeing and trying to know is men and women as humans, not as monsters or victims.
The pacing of the film is so strange at times that it feels like melodrama overwhelmed by the speed of that proverbial Mercedes that signals the beginning of the doctor’s downward spiral. I guess the fast car – and the irrelevant white doctor character – was for the American audience.
