The Last King of Scotland Kevin MacDonald UK 2006
"You’re a child, that’s the terrifying thing". Describing Idi Amin at the height of his depraved rule of Uganda in the 1970s, fictionalised young Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan eventually realises what kind of man the perplexingly charming dictator can be, in Kevin MacDonald’s film The Last King of Scotland. Adapted from the book of the same name by Giles Foden, Garrigan is based on several real Western figures who were close to Amin as his regime degenerated from Western sponsored coup to bloody despotism and international condemnation.
Forest Whitaker invests Idi Amin with an immense physical presence, emerging onto screen initially at a political rally after he has assumed power with the momentum of a charging bull. He bounds onto stage bombastically delivering what the crowd want to hear, threatening to surge forward with almost every crescendo of his speech. He plays Amin as a big powerful man who seems to attract the crowd towards him as if through sheer mass alone: a literal political strongman. That such a man should be so volatile is initially overlooked or even expected and forgiven, as compensation for the charm.
This enthusiasm and boundless energy is what drives the film forward as Garrigan, after a chance meeting with Amin, is offered the post as his personal physician. Whitaker’s Amin is extremely hard not to like with all his charming idiosyncrasies - he adores Scotland for example. Or how can an audience not warm to a portly gentleman who summons Garrigan to his bedroom late at night with stomach pains only to find out that he actually has trapped wind! Amin deflates first with a burst of flatulence and then laughter.
He is a monster though as Garrigan slowly discovers as the disappearances mount up and the country goes to pieces. Whitaker’s Amin has the charm and genial humour of a child as well as the lack of morality and consequence. Rarely are the demons of our age, the political dictators, allowed to be depicted with the charm that gets them into power in the first place, as Whitaker’s Amin.
Whilst Whitaker has a ball playing the balloon-esque Amin, MacAvoy is marooned in leading man territory. He’s playing us and as the film’s conscience has the harder task of taking us with him along the arc of public opinion from the initially popular Western backed coup through to the 1976 Israeli hostage crisis, where Amin personally intervened and as the coda informs us finally lost international approval.
MacAvoy mostly succeeds with the toothy schoolboy charm that seems suited to him playing period characters in the 70s and 80s (take his other forthcoming film 80s set Starter for Ten) with his tousled slightly overlong hair. MacAvoy seems born to play the flawed hero, the guy who will always be tempted by life. Take Mr Tummnus in the Chronicles of Narnia, a fawn as child abuser, or his charismatic car thief in the television series Shameless. Here he’s blithely naïve about Amin, accepting the benefits of the friendship but ignoring the dangers, until it’s far too late reaching senseless proportions when his reckless behaviour leads him to conduct an affair with one of Amin’s wives. We later see her laid out in the morgue with detached limbs, arm swapped for legs.
Kevin MacDonald has a strong documentary background and the transition is compelling from One Day in September to Touching the Void (Documentary-drama) and now The Last King of Scotland with its rich palette of earthy reds, lush greens and orange, which almost evoke a tartan that Amin may aspire to but will never actually have. It all starts off with a documentary-drama feel which soon leads to drama and then reverts back to source in a coda that shows actual documentary footage of Amin to conclude the story.
In line with the recent wave of Western originated African issue films (Hotel Rwanda, Shooting Dogs, The Constant Gardener etc) the rest of the world does nothing much whilst the massacres occur, summarised by the character we identify with Garrigan: a trend in common with the current humanitarian disaster in Darfur. The Last King of Scotland rubs this in our face with Amin’s charisma and subdued misdeeds.
As Amin tells Garrigan "Your death will be the first real thing to happen to you". The transformation from charming rogue to howling lunatic is complete by the end at the 1976 hostage crisis, where Amin takes time off from playing the statesman freeing hostages, to torture Garrigan. Culpability is a problem because should Garrigan deserve to escape from his ridiculous misdeeds? The excuse given by the man who helps him is that if a white man tells the tale the West will believe it, giving his life to let Garrigan escape. As this is a made up story Garrigan could easily be killed sharing the fate of the 300,000 who were murdered by the Amin regime. A fate not avoided by Ralph Fiennes’ diplomat in The Constant Gardener one might note.
