The Last King of Scotland

Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) and Nicolas Garrigan (James McAvoy) meet for the first time in The Last King of Scotland. The Scot goes on to become the personal physician and personal advisor of the brutal dictator as his regime sours in 1970s Uganda.

Unfortunately it was difficult to come to this film with an open mind, as the central performance of Forest Whitaker has already won a swag of awards. Nevertheless, Kevin Macdonald has great pedigree as a documentary filmmaker (One Night in September, Touching the Void) and it really shines through in this kind of material, which (even though it is not a true story) contains enough factual material to be interesting on that level. James McAvoy (where did he come from?) is actually the centrepiece of the film; while it features Amin, it is actually the about the story of Dr. Nicolas Garrigan and his travails in Uganda. It opens convincingly enough with a stifling dinner with his parents in Scotland that would be enough to send anyone running off to Africa, and then basically cuts to his arrival in Uganda as he begins as he means to continue by bedding the girl sitting next to him on the bus. He works for a time with a doctor and his wife (played by Gillian Anderson: whatever happened to her career?) before having quite random contact with Amin and thenceforch basically being whisked away to serve as Amin's personal physician. That development, while it seems bizarre, is given credence by the fact that Garrigan is too interested in his partner's wife and in what is quite characterisation by McAvoy he is fairly listless anyway, and gives the impression that he doesn't really know what he wants in Uganda. It all goes downhill from there for Amin though Garrigan is oblivious to most things apart from Amin's third wife, and events come to a head at the Entebbe incident, with a particularly gruesome torture scene (much more so than Casino Royale's effort) and then an ending that seemed lifted from Platoon.

It is indeed a performance of immense depth and power from Forest Whitaker, and the footage of the real Amin at the end of the film only seems to emphasise this feat. He also does a rather impressive trick with his eye which, if not natural, is a great length to go to for character's sake. He must be a huge man in reality too, for it is his physical as much as his vocal and intellectual might that seems to dominate all around him. He also brings out in Amin this idea that he is actually quite a childish man, though trapped in this huge bulk of a body and with a huge concept of himself to boot. Interestingly, this film is a two-hander at heart: while Amin's wives and goons fill out the cast, it is him and Garrigan who come to dominate the film - there is a very strange reintroduction of the Gillian Anderson character at one point which seems misjudged and is more confusing than anything else given we only see twenty seconds of her. There were only three problems I had with the film: firstly, I am prepared to ccept the McAvoy character was a naif, but to such a hopeless degree perhaps not; I don't know too much about the actual history but I think events were telescoped without much clarification (how long was it from the coup to Entebbe anyway?); and finally the conclusion for me didn't match up to the rest of the film: the violence is so swift and horrific - though that is doubtless the point - and then the conclusion seems a little rushed (how Garrigan thought his plan would ever work...).

But these are minor quibbles in the end with what is an entertaining and involving film, as well as being quite horrifying at times. The documentarist's eye for underplaying and shoring up central narrative with references to the outside world suits the film very well, and all up it is an enjoyable as well as being an intense experience in the cinema.

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