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If you haven’t seen this yet, make the time, it’s worth it.
SPOILERS AHEAD.
So, what did you think of The Last King Of Scotland? Whatever the title and promo poster might suggest, this isn’t a comprehensive biopic of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, and despite Whitaker’s powerful presence, it is at least as much the story of Nicholas Garrigan (McAvoy), the fictional Scottish medical graduate who The Last King of Scotland portrays as becoming Amin’s personal physician, broadly following Giles Foden’s novel of the same name. Incidentally, while I think Amin did have a Scottish doctor at one point, Garrigan is a composite character most closely based on former Amin associate Bob Astles, and a lot of the incidents that involve him in the film obviously transpired somewhat differently in reality. Plenty to discuss about how misleading it may be insert a fictional character into a historical narrative, and maybe we can get into that later, but the film does use it as a helpful tool in gaining a perspective on Amin’s regime, and it allows for a plethora of interpretations of how Garrigan might represent the West’s attitude to Uganda at the time.
Some reviews have concentrated on the relative absence of Amin’s atrocities on screen, making the argument that the film is unwilling to show Amin’s brutality and instead chooses to focus on the other, weaker elements of the plot. For a start, there are at least two scenes I don't really ever wish to revisit. Other reviews have criticised Garrigan for being an unsympathetic character:
For the plot revolving around Garrigan to work, we need Garrigan to be a character we can care about, but there is just nothing about him that drives the viewer to feel much sympathy for him; even as things get really bad, there's a part of you that thinks, "Well, that's what he gets for being so incredibly stupid." I suppose it depends upon whether you view Garrigan as a naive innocent caught in circumstances that escalate beyond his control, or a morally blind, self-absorbed man-child more concerned with himself than what he sees happening around him. In that respect, Garrigan also serves as a symbol of white Western involvement in African nations.
It would be unfair to compare the depth of Whitaker’s immersion into the role of the brutal dictator with the part of rising star McAvoy (aka the New Ewan McGregor), but despite this the film really is the tale of the physician. McAvoy is dramatically and physically swamped by Whitaker, but this imbalanced relationship appropriately reflects one of the key ideas about how personal power operates in the film, and in terms of his performance the young Scottish actor never seems to lack spontaneity or authenticity. Gillian Anderson is convincing in her small but not insignificant role as someone caught between wanting to help and her desire, like Garrigan, for new experiences, and who is crucially that bit more educated or cynical about the relationship between the state and the people.
The reason I think I personally identified with Garrigan is because he’s neither a completely noble, altruistic physician nor a spineless Western tourist. The opening of the film displays this best, with the young graduate sticking his finger randomly onto the globe and setting off to Uganda during the seventies to help in a small medical practice. On the way he asks questions about the country, makes friends, has to ask about the roving groups of armed men (Amin’s troops). He’s a character that literally knows fuck all about the place he’s ended up, but who’s prepared to approach it with an outgoing attitude and good intentions. It’s a difficult role to balance, because you probably want to reproach him for being so ignorant, and at the same time the role is more realistic for portraying his ignorance, and McAvoy manages to convey that sort of open-faced enthusiasm without making you think he’s an idiot or punchable (hopefully). In a really basic way he does this by “joining in”. He’s not embarrassed to go and play football with the local kids, he joins in the cheering by the locals of Amin’s nearby rally - and he’s visibly invigorated by their enthusiasm.
So so far we’ve got this gallus young Scot, confident, garrulous, irreverent, daring, and I mention that he’s a Scot not because think that attitude is uniquely Scottish, but it’s a very recognisable attitude to me of a group of well-meaning people who are sometimes prepared to move very quickly beyond the limits of their past experience and jump over the the more formal barriers that lie between people. A lot of this film focuses on the similarities between Garrigan and Amin, how that willingness to extend your sense of self and say “I’m like you” can be perverted. Amin, at the same rally, makes the crux of his speech an identification with the local people, saying that he’s one of them, that he puts them before him even, before similarly joining in with one of their ritual dances. When Amin and Garrigan meet, their point of identification is in Garrigan’s decisiveness, and then in their mutual identification as caring about Scotland, which Amin equated with being anti-English. The rest of the film concentrates on how Amin brings Garrigan closer and closer to his own identity, and how language, colour and nationality can be used to both charm and hold power over people. Garrigan will resist the efforts of the British High Commission because he resists in being included in their “we”. As the film progresses, you get more of a sense of how shallow Amin’s identification with others is, and there’s an interesting association for him with the local witch doctor, who’s “false cure” is still preferred by the 80% of local people who identify more with that intimate connection rather than the more impersonal Western treatment.
The film does an impressive job of switching back and forth between moments of oppressive stillness and darkness and highly energetic ones with sound and colour. Garrigan is by turns frightened and reassured by Amin’s actions, and it soon becomes clear that another key theme to the film is that mutual identification is largely meaningless without a balance in power. The distortion of power is particularly evident whenever the camera focuses in on Whitaker, his movement and energy barely allowing the viewer to get a fixed view of his image. Garrigan is increasingly shown as being out of his depth, and I’m very sympathetic to McAvoy’s performance when he exclaims the equivalent of the fact that he’s just a wee boy from Scotland and he doesn’t want to play anymore, and he wants to go home, and he realises that he can’t.
The reason that the film doesn’t focus on the most horrifying aspects of Amin’s tyranny is that we’re viewing the film from the localised, increasingly disillusioned perspective of Garrigan, who has been shielded from viewing those atrocities to some degree, and who, because he has approached Amin from a non-historical viewpoint and agreed to give him a chance, and because in doing so has been drawn closer to Amin and become identified with and complicit with him, he’s initially unable to comprehend the consequences of actions he sees as partly his, and to escape his identification with them. Which is maybe my main point, that The Last King of Scotland isn’t a complex biopic of Amin, or a dissection of his regime, it’s a speculative perspective on the effect that Amin had on those around him. And I think the film is successful because it doesn’t present you with clear moral choices, and it shows you a person who is naive but well-meaning, and it doesn’t pretend that the power they have is all-important, but it shows how without doing anything explicitly wrong they can become implicated in great moral evil and in doing so lose the power they once had to resist that evil.
The ending is maybe the poorest part of the film, with both the conflation of the fictional Garrigan's escape with the historical Entebbe incident, and the last message he receives about telling the world of Amin’s crimes, seeming quite forced. Incidentally, the movie’s presentation of a world unaware of Amin’s crimes, and the idea that an inside account of the dictatorship would not be believed by a non-white (when in fact it was the black Henry Kyemba, a former health minister, who would publish such an account), both seem unrealistic - at odds as they are with historical record. That said, Garrigan’s identity isn’t leaving unmarked, and the film unequivocally shows him as escaping from Uganda at the expense of his Ugandan counterpart, and physically and morally fucked over to go with it. |
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